Cocaine surge forces South American families from their land

Cocaine production has mushroomed across South America, forcing families from their land, sparking gang wars, and corruption, say a series of reports, which have prompted urgent calls to rethink the drug war.

Each year, the Andes’ multibillion-pound drug industry ships out more than 750 tonnes of cocaine. A new trafficking route between the continent and west Africa has grown so quickly that has been dubbed Interstate 10.

Some 6,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico last year alone, according to the Guardian newspaper, causing mounting mayhem that is showing signs of spilling north into the United States. More than 1,000 have been killed already this year in Mexico.

The grim figures come just before a crucial United Nations debate on Wednesday when ministers from across the world meet in Vienna to forge a new UN approach to drugs. Policy specialists, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron have joined those demanding change.The European Union and some Latin American countries hope to shape a strategy based on "harm reduction" measures, such as needle exchanges. But holdovers from the Bush are lobbying Barack Obama to stick with traditional US emphasis on supply.

Almost all those interviewed agreed that insatiable demand for cocaine in Europe and north America had thwarted US-led efforts to choke supply and inflicted enormous damage on Latin America."We consider the war on drugs a failure because the objectives have never been achieved," said César Gaviria, Colombia's former president and co-chair of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy. "Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation have not yielded the expected results,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “We are today farther than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs."

The commission is urging a radical move from to a public health approach, including decriminalising marijuana. Dismal statistics about coca cultivation, cocaine exports and murder rates have amplified calls to replace an outdated policy with one that focuses on curbing demand."The strategy of the US here, in Colombia and Peru was to attack the raw material and it has not worked," said Colonel René Sanabria, head of Bolivia's anti-narcotic police force. Even Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, who backs Washington's drug war, has sounded the alarm. "Organised crime could destroy us all if we do not come together to fight it," he told regional leaders recently.

The crucible is Colombia, the world's main cocaine exporter. Since 2000 it has received $6bn in mostly military aid from the US for the drug war. But despite the fumigation of 1.15m hectares of coca, the plant from which the drug is made. production has not fallen. Across the whole of South America it has spiked 16%, thanks to increases in supply from Bolivia and Peru.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children