A tale of two crises in Colombia

pink smoke wafts above the treetops, signalling where the Black Hawk helicopters should land. They circle down and, one at a time, rest their front wheels on the hillside. It is too steep to land properly, so they keep their rotors whirring while the passengers alight and then immediately lift off again.

President Iván Duque’s administration is trying to wipe out coca, as the United States insists it must. Last year it destroyed 100,000 hectares of it—twice as much as the previous administration managed in 2017. However,replanted slightly more. Coca was grown on 212,000 hectares of Colombia in 2019, 2% more than the previous year, according to estimates released by the White House on March 5th. And the new bushes were higher-yielding than the ones they replaced.

Yet President Donald Trump urges Colombia to pedal harder. He demands that it resume aerial spraying of herbicide on coca fields. This stopped in 2015 after the World Health Organisation said it might cause cancer. Spraying by hand continues—men in hazmat suits carefully target individual plants. Mr Trump wants to dump clouds of glyphosate over wide areas again. “You’re gonna have to spray,” he told Mr Duque on March 3rd. “If you don’t spray, you’re not gonna get rid of [the coca fields].

Meanwhile, on the other side of Colombia is an emergency that outsiders are neglecting. Thousands of Venezuelan refugees arrive every day. On March 13th Mr Duque announced that border crossings would be closed temporarily because of covid-19. This is unlikely to stop the influx entirely—the border is more than 2,000km long and impossible to police.

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