Colombia is edging back toward one of its most contested anti-drug tools. The government has presented Congress with a pilot plan to spray herbicide from aircraft over coca fields in Putumayo, a department in the country's southwestern Amazon fringe. Aerial spraying with glyphosate was suspended by court order back in May 2015, and this latest move is a carefully limited first step rather than a full restart.
The details are modest in scale. A resolution from the National Narcotics Council authorises spraying on no more than 1,000 hectares, using two AT-802 aircraft, and only over zones cleared through technical, environmental, operational and security checks. Justice Minister Iván Cancino told a House hearing that the point is to test how well the herbicide works on coca plants — not, as he put it, to see what happens to people who get sprayed. Communities will be kept away from application zones, and the government says any spraying must satisfy conditions set by the Constitutional Court.
Putumayo is where the stakes are highest. The department holds roughly 40,000 hectares of coca and around 22,000 families depend on the crop for income, with few alternatives available. Governor John Gabriel Molina also flagged an environmental toll: nearly 10,000 hectares of forest lost each year, alongside social problems tied to illegal economies. But he reported genuine fear among residents, whose memories of earlier spraying campaigns include health complaints and damage to wildlife, plants and water sources. Colombia's National Institute of Health recorded 93 reports of possible health effects across 65 municipalities between 2003 and 2015, though it stresses those records alone don't prove spraying caused them.
For now, a Putumayo court has temporarily blocked the spraying while it requests more information about the target zones and the communities nearby. The government has appealed. President De la Espriella's administration argues that manual eradication is dangerous work — landmines are a real threat to farmers and security forces alike — so the wider strategy mixes manual teams, drones and crop-substitution programmes.
Why should a traveller care? Putumayo sits on the edge of the Amazon and is slowly appearing on itineraries for jungle lodges, birdwatching and river trips around Mocoa and Puerto Asís. The debate over spraying touches the same forests, rivers and communities visitors come to see, and the outcome will shape both the environment and the security picture in a region where illegal economies remain active. Anyone heading to Putumayo in the coming months should follow local developments and official advisories closely, since conditions on the ground could shift as the legal back-and-forth plays out.
Credit: Colombia One
