For decades, one industry has sustained the small, remote Colombian village of Caño Cabra: cocaine.
Later, they mix the leaves with gasoline and other chemicals to make chalky white bricks of coca paste.
But two years ago, the villagers said, something alarming happened: The drug traffickers who buy the coca paste and turn it into cocaine stopped showing up.
The same pattern was repeated again and again in communities across the country where coca is the only source of income.
Colombia, the global nexus of the cocaine industry, where Pablo Escobar became the world’s best known criminal, and which still produces more of the drug than any other nation, is facing tectonic shifts as a result of domestic and global forces that are reshaping the drug industry.
Persons:
Pablo Escobar
Organizations:
Food
Locations:
Colombian, Caño, Colombia