Customers in a shop in the depths of the Colombian jungle place innocuous white pebbles on an electronic scale. In exchange they take away staples like cooking oil and eggs—here, you pay with cocaine paste
Cocaine for food and beer
“Everything is bought and sold this way. Cash is very rare and kept for emergencies,” Lorena, the 26-year-old owner of the shop, was quoted as saying by AFP. “It’s the same whether locals are paying for beer or the company of a prostitute: coke—or in this case its raw material, coca paste—is king,” the agency adds
Lorena has lived in the tiny jungle village of La Paz for seven years, a hamlet of 300 souls whose reddish-earth streets turn to mud in the rain. It lies on the banks of the Inirida River in the remote southeastern department of Guaviare, Colombia’s most underdeveloped region
FARC still the boss here
There is no electricity here, no potable water, no doctor and no police. Authority is exercised by dissident FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas who have rejected a historic peace deal to remain in the jungle
Weakest link in the drug chain
The lush greenery of the landscape lends itself to the production of the coca leaf, the basic ingredient of cocaine, of which Colombia, despite the efforts of the government and the US, is the world’s largest producer. “They tell us we are guerrillas or that we are drug traffickers. But we are the last link in the chain. In all of the drug business, we are the poorest,” a resident was quoted as saying by AFP