The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Trump and Petro Revive the Colombian Cocaine Industry || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Trump just cut off military and economic aid to Columbia, because of...you guessed it...a political clash with President Petro. Bonus points if you guessed that this move would have some adverse effects, like reviving the Colombian cocaine trade.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47vz7vA

Hey all, Peter Zine here, come to you from Madison, Wisconsin, and I thought this would be a great backdrop to talk about cocaine. For those of you who have been following the increasing drama that we're having an American foreign relations with Latin America, Columbia is the new country that is in the Trump administration's crosshairs. Specifically, the president of Columbia Petro and Trump have had a personal and professional falling out, and the United States is now withdrawing military support as well as economic aid. and I think it's good to put this into context so you can see what's coming. The reason that two-thirds of the world's cocaine comes from Colombia is really straightforward. It's got the climate for it.

Columbia is basically a series of lowland tropical zones, either on the Pacific or in the Amazonian basin, separated by a couple of really high mountain ranges. Now, people, not locking it too hot or humid, tend to live in the middle of those ranges. So below the tundra line, but above the tropic, line. High elevation is not too high. That way the heat gets cut, the humidity gets cut. Cocaine doesn't like it there. Cocaine doesn't like frost. It likes to be lower down, more in the foothills between like 1,000 feet, maybe 7,000 feet. It likes a lot of sun. 12 hours of sun a day would be great. It likes a lot of humidity, but it doesn't like a lot of wet. So growing on the

sides of mountains where there's a degree of fertility further down is what it's after. It wants warmth, but not too much heat. It wants humidity, but not too much wet. It never, never, never, never once cold. Well, if you put an illicit narcotic with a preferred geography in one part of a country and you put the people with a preferred climate and geography in a different part of the country, what you get is a parallel economics system, one based on smuggling and drug production and one based on more normal things. So it's a perfect recipe for a civil war. And basically starting about a century ago, we got one in Colombia. Eventually the lowlands, the midlands where the cocaine could grow,

an illicit economy that was based on narcotics smuggling, whereas the uplands, where most of the Colombians actually live, where most of the normal economic activity was, went a different direction. And these two zones clashed and in time eventually ideology played a part with international leftism being more powerful in the coca producing regions and more laissez-faire semi-capitalist conservatism and normal economic activity playing a higher role in the the Highlands. Now, by the time we get to the 2000s, the 80s were behind us, Miami Vices behind us, the United States realizes that cooking's a real problem, and the Colombian cartels were a real national security threat. So the United States engaged in a $30 billion program of partnership

with the Colombians to build out their military to basically win the Civil War. And by the time we got to the early 2010s that basically how things had played out. Fark had been broken, they had reduced to a much smaller footprint. And by the time you get to about 2015, they were basically spent as a military and a political force. But the cocaine didn't go away, because cocaine had a very different geography than where most Colombians lived. And so you had new forces that rose up to take FARC's place. Specifically, the more right-wing paramilitaries that were formed near and partnered with the government to fight the FARC, they all of a sudden moved into the FARC zones and started trafficking the cocaine themselves. So as often happens in a war,

the victors then split. And now we have a different problem. So the U.S. government shifted tact. Because this was no longer a civil war in the traditional sense, the U.S. started to invest in economic programs in Colombia so that the small farmholders would have an option for their own economic wherewithal that was not dependent on narcotics. That's flowers, that's cocoa for chocolate, that's coffee. Columbia still produces some of the world's best coffee. Those three things together, supplied by American aid to help with infrastructure and development and planting and financing for farmers, was wildly successful until four years ago we had a split in the Colombian political establishment. You see, until that point, pretty much all of the presidents of Columbia

came from that kind of center-right, laissez-faire economics, strong national security point of view, because they had been in this civil war for so long. Well, four years ago, we got a new guy by the name of Petro, who had a different view and had more political loyalties in some of these more outlying regions than had been somewhat disadvantaged by the Civil War and the transition since. Petro is not the greatest politician. He calls himself a center-leftist.

He calls himself sometimes a socialist. A lot of people call him things that are worse. But really, he's a populist. He believes that the institutions of Columbia, dead set against him and trying to disrupt his presidency. He's not a very good leader. He hasn't selected very good people to be on his cabinet. He thinks that tariffs are a great economic policy to encourage domestic industrial development. He's not really big fan of rule of law because it's often on the opposite side of what he wants to do. And he focuses on his personal charisma to drive

things through instead of building coalitions to get policies adopted. Does any of this sound familiar? I mean, he's basically the Colombian version of Trump just with some different political coloring. Anyway, as you might guess, you get two charisma forward, non-technocrats who are very larger than life and bombastic with their personal politics, and the two of them have not got along, Trump and Petro. So we had a falling out very recently because Trump's policies a little bit further to the east have been blowing up ships outside of Venezuela. Colombia is a neighbor. Colombia and Venezuela have never really gotten along.

It's not like their allies or anything like that. But it has gotten a little bit too close to home. And Petro said that the last vessel that got blown up was actually Colombian fishermen. Now, no one on either side has provided any data or proof to their claims or their counterclaims. Was it Venezuelan drug smugglers? Don't know. The U.S. hasn't provided any information. Was it Colombian fishermen?

Don't know. The Colombian government hasn't provided any information. but it provided the spark that caused this current blowup between the two countries, and so the Trump administration has ended all military assistance and is in the process of ending all economic existence. Now, whether this is a good or bad idea for foreign relations, I'll let you decide that for yourself, but I can tell you exactly what it's going to mean for cocaine. Without the military assistance, it's arguable that the Colombian government doesn't have the ability

to impose rule of law through the coke of growing regions. And without that economic system, It's absolutely impossible for farmers in an outland highland area like this to economically viably grow things like basics for chocolate and coffee and flowers. And so they're going to turn back to growing coca to make cocaine. So is Petro a good leader? No, absolutely not. And we've got elections next year.

Hopefully he'll be gone. But in the meantime, the Trump administration has established the perfect environment to make sure that cocaine acreage explodes. And now that Americans seem to finally be turning away from fentanyl to more normal drugs, cocaine is there to fill the gap.