Distance was never Australia’s defence against cocaine

Abelardo de la Espriella came to office promising to send shockwaves through Colombia’s criminal landscape. Three days later he was feeling them.

Last Friday, in a covered arena in Cali, a city at the edge of Colombia’s most contested drug corridor, rather than Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, de la Espriella was sworn in as Colombia’s 43rd president. On Monday, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck Chocó, killing at least 110 people, and bringing down buildings in Cali itself, the city where he had taken the oath.

Chocó is among the poorest departments in Colombia and much of it can only be reached by boat or plane. This isolation is also why the area has long been prime territory for coca, one of Colombia’s perennial crises and arguably the toughest test for de la Espriella.

The outsider criminal lawyer known as El Tigre won on a single hard promise: to rescue the motherland. Before Monday’s earthquake that meant rescuing the country from Colombia’s narco-terrorist organisations, by law or by force, rather than negotiate with them.

That promise reaches all the way to Australia.

Colombia today grows more coca than at any point since UN monitoring began. Not even at the height of the Cali and Medellín cartels did the country send this much cocaine to market. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime puts the 2024 area at 261,000 hectares (Opens in new window), larger than the Australian Capital Territory, and a figure senior Colombian analysts dispute and estimate around 300,000 hectares (Opens in new window), amid political pressure and questions over methodology. That land can yield 2,664 tonnes of pure cocaine a year, enough to fill hundreds of semi-submersible vessels that now run cocaine across the Pacific.

Australia sits at the far end of that supply chain, but not far enough to escape the consequences of the drug policy that outgoing president Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, pursued for four years. He called it “total peace”: negotiating with narco-terrorist groups rather than confronting them (Opens in new window). The results are not seriously disputed (Opens in new window). Cultivation hit record highs. In 2023 alone, potential cocaine output jumped more than 50% in a single year (Opens in new window). Forced eradication collapsed from nearly 69,000 hectares in 2022 to about 9,000 in 2024. Kidnappings rose 122% across the first 30 months of Petro’s presidency (Opens in new window).

De la Espriella has promised the reverse. In practice that means a return to the harder tactics of the early 2000s, when the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, backed by Washington, began a decade-long decline that bottomed out at 48,000 hectares in 2012, the lowest since UN monitoring began. That decline came partly through the aerial spraying Colombia banned in 2015 on health grounds.

Those tactics divide opinion. Their defenders point to the maths: when Colombia squeezed, coca shrank; when it eased, coca exploded. Their critics warn that a militarised response carries a human cost of its own. It is the same trade-off seen from opposite ends.

For Australia, New Zealand, and their Pacific Island neighbours, the line is direct. It rises and falls with the choices of the country that makes most of the world’s cocaine. An Australia-Colombia drug sea lane must pass straight through Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand, all major transit hubs.

For Australia alone, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s latest wastewater analysis puts cocaine consumption at a record 7,985 kilograms in 2024–25, up from 6,835 the year before (Opens in new window). Australians pay more than $300 a gram, roughly three times the American price, and more than 20 times the Colombian. Yet the market has kept expanding regardless. In just the last four years, it has grown from $1.4 billion to $2.79 billion.

The stakes are larger than street prices. Latin American transnational serious and organised crime should not be read as a policing problem. It is a geopolitical one. Colombia’s narco-terrorists and the region’s syndicates sit at the intersection of crime, terror and, more worryingly, foreign interference. Australia has seen how that works. Canberra expelled Iran’s ambassador last year after ASIO concluded Tehran had directed arson attacks on Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne through local criminals. Hostile states do not need to build networks here. They rent the ones the drug economy paid for. And they do it precisely to destabilise Western democracies at their edges.

Read that way, de la Espriella’s promise is not distant news. It is upstream of what happens in the air and seaports of Sydney, and in the small Pacific Island towns where cocaine is arriving in increasing numbers. The choice Colombians made in June, and what El Tigre does from here, will set the volume of cocaine moving through Australia’s region until 2030.

Canberra should welcome the new government and work closely with it. It should bring something Colombia cannot supply on its own. Australia has deep standing across the Pacific. Colombia has none. Convening its island neighbours and Latin America’s producer states around the same table is the one contribution only Australia can make. The demand pulling this cocaine across the Pacific is partly our own.