The president of Colombia stresses that he is not proposing to legalize cocaine

It points to drug traffickers who live in Miami or Madrid as responsible for drug-related violence

MADRID, 18 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has responded to criticism of his drug policy to clarify that the proposal does not provide for allowing or legalizing cocaine.

In some recent statements, he proposed "devising the program so that peasants can still cultivate coca leaves while they are planting the substitute crop, until proving that the substitute crop works", for which reason this Saturday he came up with these words in an act at the General José María Córdova Military Cadet School in Bogotá.

"When we say that we are not going to attack (a) a peasant, that we are going to buy his crop while we transform the region so that it can become productive in legal economies, we are not saying that we are going to allow cocaine. On the contrary, we are going to capture the owners of the cocaine. That is the objective that I propose to the Army, the Police, and the Public Force," he pointed out, according to the Colombian newspaper 'El Tiempo'.

For Petro, "drug trafficking is changing ways." "Today we can talk about drug-trafficking multinationals," she pointed out. For this reason, these new methods must be counteracted with new capabilities of the Public Force.

"Colombia entered 15,000 million dollars a year. It was almost double the exports of coal, say the experts," he stated. Now there must be a new approach in politics to combat drug trafficking because the fumigation of illicit crops is not the solution.

"The large shipments must be stopped," said Petro, who has blamed "the owners of drug capital, those who launder assets" for the violence experienced in Colombia due to drugs. These people "do not live in El Tarra, they do not live in Carepa or in the poor neighborhoods of Quibdó, or Buenaventura, or Tumaco, or Ciudad Bolívar, or Bosa, or the communes of Medellín. The victims live there," he argued.

"Those people live in Miami, in Madrid. Perhaps nearby, in Bogotá. They have walked through the halls of the Palacio de Nariño, they have become senators many times, they have bought congressmen, they move on the stages of world power. There is the real danger to national tranquility", he stressed.

For this reason, he inquired: "What is the fault of the Colombian peasantry for what is happening with 130 million drug users in the world dedicated to cocaine?" Petro has highlighted that in Europe there are about 80 million people who consume drugs and in the United States, approximately 50 million.