3,000 tons of cocaine: The controversial figure that pits Colombia against the United Nations

The world’s largest producer and exporter of cocaine doesn’t know its own production. The figure exists, but no one can vouch for its accuracy. After nearly 20 years using the same methodology, Colombian President Gustavo Petro denounced its inaccuracy and decided not to release the numbers. The cocaine production figure, which has continued to rise, became a state secret. After weeks of tension between the Colombian government and the United Nations, the agency responsible for these measurements until now, EL PAÍS reveals this secret figure: 3,001 tons of cocaine were potentially produced in 2024. Four dubious digits that summarize a huge problem: Colombia lacks a reliable method for measuring one of the world’s most profitable illegal businesses. And without accurate information, it’s difficult to assess the effectiveness of its anti-drug policies.

The figure represents a 12.6% increase from the previous year — a rate that has been slowing down, as the UN report admits — but its political implications are lethal. It is yet another bullet in the war that U.S. President Donald Trump is waging against Colombia’s first leftist president, using drug trafficking as a pretext.

In his anti-drug crusade — which he has used to justify strikes against alleged drug-running boats that have killed 83 people so far in the Caribbean and the Pacific — Trump has accused Petro of being a “drug leader” and has sanctioned him, without providing any evidence, for his alleged criminal ties. Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added: “Since President Gustavo Petro came to power, cocaine production in Colombia has exploded to the highest rate in decades, flooding the United States and poisoning Americans.” These accusations reinforce Washington’s hardline policy and amplify the inflammatory rhetoric used by Petro himself, who has even announced on X the end of cooperation with U.S. intelligence services. Bilateral tensions between these two former allies have reached unprecedented levels.

It’s not so easy to accuse the Latin American president of inaction. But neither is it easy to praise his administration. While Petro boasts of having seized the largest amount of drugs in history — more than 2,700 tons of cocaine since he took office in August 2022 — coca leaf cultivation has reached a record 261,000 hectares, although its growth rate has been slowing. In any case, the Colombian president’s methods are the opposite of those of the White House’s. While U.S. authorities celebrate the targets they’ve taken down, Petro defends approaches such as regulation and anti-narcotics operations “without harming” human rights.

In its 2024 report, which remains under seal, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) attributed the increase in potential cocaine production to the increase in cultivated hectares, but not exclusively. In a section accessed by EL PAÍS, experts indicate that growers have improved the productivity of coca plots and the facilities where the hydrochloride is produced. The increased effectiveness of widely used and readily available chemicals for processing the coca leaf has also played a role.

Given the question marks surrounding the methodology used so far by the UNODC, the Petro administration decided not to publish the data until its review. Critics have accused the Colombian government of concealment and lack of transparency, but one of its advisors refuted the attacks: “Why would the government publish data that is wrong?” The United Nations agency itself ended up acknowledging “budgetary and security” limitations in its measurements, and is now negotiating a review of the calculation with the Colombian Ministry of Justice. Contacted by EL PAÍS, the ministry declined to comment. The UNODC, for its part, admitted to this newspaper that the indicator “does not capture all of the Colombian government’s efforts regarding drugs,” since “it shows efforts to prevent cocaine production, but does not account for efforts to prevent cocaine from reaching consumers once it has already been produced.”

Since 1999, the UNODC has been the sole authority for measuring coca cultivation in Colombia. Each year, it publishes two key variables: the hectares under cultivation and the potential cocaine production. And in 2023, it reported a figure that set off alarm bells: a 53% increase in potential production compared to the previous year, reaching 2,664 tons.

But that figure is misleading. The agency divides the country into four regions and only visits one per year to conduct field tests, then extrapolates those results to the rest of the country over a four-year cycle. This system, in place since 2007, explains part of the 53% jump: in 2023, the UN assessed the Pacific region, the most productive coca-growing enclave and one that hadn’t been assessed since 2019. Furthermore, no region was visited in 2022, and the 2021 data was reused instead. The comparison had obvious limitations. In 2024, the region analyzed was Catatumbo, on the border with Venezuela, another key coca-growing area.

At the time, the Colombian government authorized the publication of the report without publicly objecting to the methodology. And, according to Petro, that “error” was what led Trump to remove Colombia from the list of countries that cooperate in the fight against drug trafficking — a measure known as decertification — for the first time in three decades. This year, Petro decided to confront the issue head-on and embargo the figures. Even acknowledging the system’s limitations, several experts question why he waited three years to address the problem and is only doing so now, under pressure from Washington.

Talks between government delegates and UNODC representatives have progressed in recent weeks, although they remain marked by underlying tension and without definitive conclusions. For now, the indicator of potential cocaine production could be replaced or complemented by that of “available cocaine”: the amount of the drug that actually reaches the market. This new parameter would allow for a more precise measurement of state action, by including factors such as seizures, unharvested batches, domestic consumption, potential legal uses, and flows from other countries, as confirmed to this newspaper by the UNODC.

The major obstacle, however, remains what to do with last year’s figure — the 53% jump — which is widely agreed to be flawed. For the government, it is a red line that the UNODC acknowledge the error that, according to Petro, led to the country’s decertification and exposed the weaknesses in the measurement system. It is unclear whether it will do so.

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