Scattered across the Amazon Rainforest are long deforested slices of land cut neatly into dense areas of canopy. Blink, and you might miss them, but satellite imagery shows dozens of these narrow carve-outs in Peru alone, with many located around natural protected areas or within Indigenous reserves. They are clandestine airstrips used to transport freshly-processed cocaine out of the jungle.
The airstrips, known as narcopistas, are—according to campaigners—the starkest examples of how the global drug prohibition system is inadvertently driving environmental destruction by turning over the trade for a globally desirable commodity into the hands of organized crime.
“Eradication efforts directed at coca crops usually force growers to move into and deforest more remote areas of the jungle, further from law enforcement inspections,” said Rebeca Lerer, Latin America coordinator of the campaign group International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice.
The criminal infrastructure for the trafficking of cocaine out of the Amazon is becoming more sophisticated, bolstering routes to extract illegal timber, minerals, and other natural resources.
“Illegal activities inside the Amazon are all connected,” said Daniela Dias, coordinator of Amazônia SOS, a Brazilian nongovernmental organization dedicated to the conservation of the Amazon. Her organization is located in Acre, Brazil, a border region between Peru and Bolivia. “Criminal organizations have full control where we are based,” she added. “Policymakers do not talk about it.”
“Illegal activities inside the Amazon are all connected. Criminal organizations have full control where we are based. Policymakers do not talk about it.”
Daniela Dias
coordinator, Amazônia SOS
As Lerer told the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Colombia last year, the multibillion-dollar cocaine trade provides an unparalleled cash flow for cartels—not typically the greatest environmental stewards—to diversify into other environmentally degrading industries. “In Colombia, once many of the coca farms have been raided by police forces, they are then used for cattle ranching and in some cases, mining operations,” Lerer said. “Eradication efforts end up clearing the way for the advance of the agribusiness and mineral exploration frontiers.”
The environmental harms of cocaine prohibition are increasingly difficult to ignore. The Amazon contains an estimated 123 billion tons of carbon. Deforestation, driven primarily by cattle ranching, releases sequestered carbon into the atmosphere, and the rapid decline in tree cover slows the rainforest’s uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change.
“The criminal infrastructure built principally for cocaine is increasingly facilitating illegal deforestation, timber trafficking, and illegal gold mining via control of transport routes, corruption and intimidation of local authorities and communities, as well as the fear of violence,” Dr. Charles Barber, director of the environmental advocacy network Nature Crime Alliance, wrote in July.
“We need to repeal prohibition and transition the coca and cocaine trade into a new regulated and legal economy where ecological harm reduction is applied throughout the whole chain of production,” said Clemmie James, international coordinator of the International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice. The inability of authorities to control the illegal drug trade, she added, enables “uncontrolled extractivism in the planet’s most ecologically fragile forest regions, which are key to our climate future.” In February, at a coca policy conference in Peru called Wisdom of the Leaf, she concluded her presentation by saying: “Cocaine is a climate issue.
There are at least 76 illegal airstrips throughout the Peruvian Amazon, mostly located in Atalaya, Ucayali, according to a year-long investigation by Mongabay. Ten of the airstrips are splayed across forest concessions—harvesting-rights contracts designated to protect the forest or for sustainable use—but the areas where they are located have reportedly been taken over by drug cartels. There are around 3,000 airstrips in the Brazilian Amazon, according to InfoAmazonia; a third of them are in protected or Indigenous lands, per a report by the research collective, MapBiomas.
Close to one of the Ucayali airstrips, reporters earlier this year found plastic drums used to produce cocaine dumped at the edge of a river. The constant jettisoning of toxic chemicals from thousands of clandestine cocaine labs across the Amazon has long created mini ecological disaster zones.
As many as 15 Indigenous leaders have been murdered near Peruvian airstrips over the past five years, as communities have been surrounded by illegal coca cultivation and drug trafficking operations, according to Mongabay (though the exact number could not be independently verified). One Indigenous leader said that the increase in airstrips is tied to the rising murders, sometimes of land defenders objecting to cartels razing forested areas. “We do not really know how many die each day,” he told Mongabay. “There are no police officers, no authorities. The state has forgotten us.”
Airstrips help drug traffickers evade detection. “In most cases, I’ve seen roughly 800 kilos of pure cocaine in each trip that has been captured,” said Ricardo Soberón, former president of DEVIDA, Peru’s official drug control commission, who now campaigns for coca growers’ rights. “Having numerous landing sites gives the opportunity to make final decisions just before landing, so the police or military will not have time to arrive.”
The 76 airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon confirmed in the Mongabay report alone are not a major deforestation driver in a trend that has seen annual rates of deforestation in Peru quadruple in two decades, but the true number of airstrips is much higher, according to Soberón.
Coca production has risen steeply in recent years, and more than half of new coca crops in Ucayali from 2003 to 2022 were grown on deforested land, according to a 2024 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report.
“Criminal law has failed to control the supply of raw material for producing cocaine,” Soberón added. “We are witnessing a huge increase in the amount of cocaine airstrips and laboratories all across the jungle in Peru.”
At the same time, seizures of illegal timber have risen, the UNODC report said, confirming an exponential increase in clandestine airstrips. A separate study published in 2017 found that cocaine trafficking could account for up to 30% of deforestation across Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. “Cocaine trafficking is likely to have severe and lasting consequences in terms of maintaining moist tropical forest cover in Central America,” the study’s authors wrote.
Calls to end the prohibition of cocaine remain largely taboo, despite worldwide use standing at an all-time high, with at least 25 million people consuming the stimulant drug in 2023, thousands dying in relation to cocaine harms annually, and illegal production up a third year-over-year. “The war on drugs, especially here in [Acre], is extremely stupid as a policy,” said Dias. “It only makes the violence rates go up and up. What you are seeing here in the Amazon is that the criminal drug trade organizations have been able to [use] environmental crimes as a new means of capitalization, and to expand their control over the territory.”
“Drug prohibition is a key driver in financing and promoting violence,” said Lerer. “But even people who are not anti-cocaine moralists are not able to have a rational discussion about it. There cannot be an illegal plant; it’s just absurd.”
In April, Lerer co-edited a special issue of Platô Magazine on the intersection between land use, drug policy, and climate justice. It notes the use of the term narcogarimpo, which pertains to drug trafficking associated with illegal gold mining, involving the shared means of transportation and lethal firepower, as well as selling ore and cattle to launder money. The prolific use of mercury to mine for gold has disastrous impacts on Indigenous territories, UNODC warned in 2023, with illegal mining on Indigenous land in Brazil estimated to have increased by almost 500% between 2010 and 2020. Up to 90% of the Yanomami and Munduruku population suffer from mercury poisoning, the report said, which can lead to serious disease and death.
“The war on drugs policy violates the rights of Indigenous populations who are at the center of the conflict between the state and drug cartels,” said Dr. Aiala Colares Couto, who studies drug trafficking at Universidade do Estado do Pará. “Criminal groups are becoming stronger, expanding their scope of activity beyond drug trafficking. This creates great pressure on biodiversity and the forest. This is an urgent issue.”
UNODC concluded in its 2023 report that “‘narco-deforestation’—the laundering of drug trafficking profits into land speculation, agriculture, cattle ranching and related infrastructure—poses a growing danger to the world’s largest rainforest.” The subtitle to the report was, “How a complex crime ecosystem is endangering the world’s largest rainforest and imperiling efforts to combat climate change,” but the 37-page document did not mention prohibition explicitly once.
Campaigners like James, also senior policy and campaigns officer at Health Poverty Action, an NGO that supports Indigenous communities, say that the script has to be flipped. They criticize leading environmental organizations for appearing reluctant to speak out about the compounding negative effects of cocaine prohibition. “Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, and others need to start integrating drug policy into their work,” she said. “Avoiding it is a dangerous omission and will delay real progress in saving the Amazon.”
“The war on drugs, especially here in Acre, is extremely stupid as a policy. It only makes the violence rates go up and up.”
Daniela Dias
coordinator, Amazônia SOS
The Open Society Foundations has been perhaps the most prominent organization to call out the impact of drug prohibition on the environment. “Across the world, cultivators and traffickers of illicit drugs are wreaking ecological havoc—clearing fields from primary rainforest, piggy-backing drug smuggling with traffic in illegal hardwoods and endangered species, and laundering money in land deals that devastate protected forests,” the civil society group said in a 2015 report.
“The international drug control system must share the blame for this devastation,” the report continued. “Forty years of dogged adherence to drug crop eradication and drug interdiction policies have been instrumental in hounding drug farmers and traffickers into increasingly fragile landscapes. Although these policies have arguably done little to stem the cultivation and traffic of illicit drugs, it has done much to amplify the environmental devastation and degradation that accompanies them.”
Legalizing cocaine, however, remains a fringe political position despite strong campaigning on the world stage from Colombia and Bolivia, which pressured the World Health Organization to review the evidence underpinning the global coca ban in a report to be released in September. Though unlikely, this process could result in the descheduling of coca: the mildly stimulating, iron- and calcium-rich medicinal plant from which cocaine derives, that millions of people in the Andes use daily for spiritual and dietary purposes. The countries that sit on the Commission on Narcotic Drugs will vote on any measure recommended by WHO next March.
“Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in widely reported remarks this February. “If you want peace, you have to dismantle the business [of drug trafficking]. It could easily be dismantled if they legalize cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine.” Bolivian Vice President David Chochquehuanca told the coca summit: “It is time to decolonize the convention’s current regulations and [end] the six decades of the colonization of the coca leaf.”
In November, Belém will host this year’s U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP30, in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated at one of the main cocaine routes out of Latin America for Europe, the setting is ripe for the unification of the drug liberalization and climate movements.
“Communities most impacted by decades of drug war must play a central role in creating a future that rigorously promotes and protects Indigenous rights, practices, agroecology, and land justice,” said James, “in an urgent attempt to deliver climate justice.”
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