The decades-old U.S. practice of judging and punishing other states for allegedly substandard counter-drug performance through “decertification” is an antiquated, blunt, counterproductive foreign policy tool that should no longer exist. The White House must not use decertification to punish the people of Colombia, a longtime partner nation that has been the world’s largest cocaine producer since the 1990s, and is now facing mounting security challenges. (Colombia is not a significant source of fentanyl, methamphetamine, or other synthetic drugs.)
Though the government of Gustavo Petro has failed to meet its own security and governance objectives—including results against illicit drug production—this owes more to poor management and leadership failures than to malice or any inclination to benefit drug traffickers. A unilateral U.S. punishment, cutting off aid and credit, would compound the damage at a sensitive time, making U.S. goals in Colombia even harder to achieve.
What is “certification?
By the middle of September, it is possible that the Trump administration may “decertify” Colombia for “failing demonstrably” to comply with counter-drug obligations. This would be the first time that a U.S. administration has decertified Colombia since 1997. Since then, among Latin American and Caribbean nations, U.S. administrations have only applied this punishment to Bolivia and Venezuela, which, unlike Colombia, do not maintain cordial relations with Washington. (Guatemala and Haiti were both briefly decertified in the early 2000s, but the White House waived punishments.)
Section 490 of the Foreign Assistance Act, passed in 1987 and amended in 2002, establishes an annual process in which the president must list all major source and transit countries for illicit drugs, and then select which countries should face sanctions for “failing demonstrably” to cooperate with “international obligations.” Those sanctions, which the White House can waive, include a 50 percent cut in U.S. assistance and an automatic “no” vote on loans, credits, and other assistance from multilateral development banks.
The last time Colombia was decertified, in 1996 and 1997, the president at the time, Ernesto Samper, stood credibly accused of receiving illicit campaign funds from drug traffickers. In 2017, during the first year of Donald Trump’s first administration, Trump’s certification statement noted that he “seriously considered” decertifying the government of Juan Manuel Santos because the production of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, was increasing. At the time, senior diplomats scrambled to dissuade Trump from making a move that would have scuttled much cooperation with the U.S. government’s largest aid recipient in the hemisphere.
The harm of a decertification
WOLA strongly urges the Trump administration not to decertify Colombia in 2025. A decertification would directly harm the Colombian people and reduce the Colombian government’s ability to protect them from violent criminal and insurgent groups. It would also make it far harder for the U.S. government to pursue other interests in Latin America’s third most populous country.
If the White House doesn’t waive sanctions, further cuts to U.S. aid would drop U.S. assistance to Colombia to its lowest levels in decades—probably since the 1980s. That would do notable damage to humanitarian and development priorities, as well as to the U.S. goals of helping Colombia increase state presence in the countryside, reduce impunity, and implement the 2016 Peace Accord. The cuts would be so deep that they would also impact military cooperation, reducing engagement with Colombian officers and starving Colombia’s security forces of resources used to maintain aging equipment.
The impact of any aid cuts, however, is blunted by the Trump administration’s already devastating cuts to foreign assistance. At the beginning of the year, the White House’s aid freezes and reviews already brought deep cuts in assistance throughout Latin America, with especially severe impacts on Colombia. Although WOLA does not have exact dollar figures, what we have seen of cancelled contracts and aid deliveries leads us to estimate at least a three-quarters reduction in assistance to Colombia in 2025, compared to the levels of prior years.
After a 21st-century average of over $550 million per year in assistance, we would be surprised to learn that aid to Colombia significantly exceeds $100 million this year. Much of the damage to the assistance relationship has already been done—but a decertification would compound it further.
The impact of an automatic U.S. “no” vote at multilateral development banks is harder to measure. The U.S. voting shares at the World Bank (15.8 percent) and at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB, 30 percent) are significant but do not provide veto power over ordinary projects, which require a simple majority vote for approval. Even so, the Colombia-U.S. Chamber of Commerce has estimated that the reduction in available liquidity could range “between $431 million and $517 million per year in the worst-case scenario.”
While it is unclear how much “loss of prestige” Colombia might suffer from public disapproval coming from an administration as ideologically extreme and willing to resort to unlawful lethal force as Trump’s, the knock-on effects of decertification could still be harmful. María Claudia Lacouture, the longtime head of AmCham Colombia, noted that a decertification could indirectly affect tourism, costing as much as $1 billion in lost revenue, Cambio reported. It could also affect the cost of external financing and the arrival of new investments: “According to the organization’s calculations, under intermediate sanctions, the cost of financing could rise by between 8 and 10 percent, which would make the country’s debt more expensive.”
In addition to harming the vast majority of the Colombian people who have nothing to do with the drug trade, a decertification would also deal a self-inflicted blow to U.S. policy objectives. The last time the U.S. government decertified Colombia, in the mid-1990s, demonstrated the counterproductive nature of this “tool.”
U.S. assistance—whether to the military and police forces, or to rule of law and development objectives—was cut or frozen, as were other forms of engagement. This happened at a crucial moment for Colombia: a time when, after the collapse of the Medellín and Cali cartels, guerrilla and paramilitary groups assumed control over much of the drug trade, which enriched them rapidly.
As these violent actors gained power and territory, kidnapping and massacring tens of thousands, the decertification process left the Clinton administration partially sidelined by its own choices. The administration decided that the only way it could keep military and police aid flowing was to employ rarely invoked emergency measures in the Foreign Assistance Act (emergency drawdowns and what is known as a “Section 614” waiver).
In 2017, William Brownfield, the Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and a former ambassador to Colombia, fought to prevent the White House from decertifying Colombia. In October of that year, after retiring, he told Colombia’s El Tiempo: “Decertifying Colombia would have been a fundamental mistake, counterproductive, false, and very stupid. Absurd, an offense, an insult to the hundreds of Colombians who have given their lives… There is no doubt that this issue—the growth of illicit crops—is serious, but the solution is not to point fingers and criticize the other government, as has been done, but for both to work together to find solutions.”
The dynamic remains the same today. Colombian security officials who, like Brownfield, support “tough-on-drugs” policies continue to urge the Trump administration not to take this step. Noting that Colombia “is perhaps the country with the highest death toll,” the country’s defense minister, retired Gen. Pedro Sánchez, said on September 6 that a decertification “would benefit drug traffickers and would be a defeat for nations and their international alliances.” A recent director of Colombia’s National Police, Gen. William Salamanca, warned on September 9, “If Colombia is decertified, the winners will be the groups operating outside the law, those who attack the military in Cauca with drones, who murder social leaders who oppose the planting of illicit crops, or who exploit peasants to kidnap uniformed personnel and imprison them alive.”
Aid cutoffs and economic sanctions will hit the legal part of Colombia’s economy while leaving illicit business largely untouched. That will create fresh incentives to participate in the cocaine economy. “Colombia will suffer more if we take away its certification because there will be more unemployed people, and then the drug traffickers and criminals will have more people who want to work for them,” said Sen. Rubén Gallego (D-Arizona) during an August visit to the country. “The greatest danger of a certification is that we punish the wrong people.”
Terminating aid and cooperation programs has already made government operations difficult in insufficiently governed conflict zones where coca is grown and cocaine is produced. It has also pushed Colombia closer to the orbit of rival, undemocratic powers like China. Decertification can be expected to accelerate this.
Colombia’s performance
Since coming to power in August 2022, the government of Gustavo Petro—the country’s first left-of-center administration in generations, if not ever—has experienced backward movement on traditional measures of drug production and transshipment. Unfortunately, this is part of a larger pattern of poor administration resulting from the combination of a president with a “go it alone” rhetorical style and officials with limited prior government experience.
This disappointing outcome is the result of management and leadership failures, not a lack of political will. There is zero evidence that the current Colombian government, at its uppermost levels, colludes with drug traffickers. Punishing Colombia and cutting off ties through decertification, then, makes no sense: it would exacerbate existing management dysfunction. Instead, the way forward should involve a joint effort to address these institutional challenges, toward a shared goal of reducing all expressions of organized crime, not just the drug trade.
The Petro government has laid out admirable objectives for both security and drug policy, and the U.S. government shares most of them. In 2023, Colombia’s administration produced policy documents for both priorities. Both sought to achieve results through participatory, consultative, rights-respecting approaches that were less reliant on punishing or using force against some of the population’s most vulnerable sectors.
The drug policy document emphasized improving governance and state presence to improve conditions in the vast, historically conflictive rural areas where Colombia’s state has been absent—a central goal of the 2016 peace accord. It called for a public health approach to drug addiction in Colombia. It sought to curb access to precursor chemicals, intensify interdiction of drug shipments, and take further action to constrain money laundering. It sought to de-emphasize forced coca eradication, except for large-scale farmers, and offered smaller-scale and poorer farmers assistance in transitioning to legal crops.
More than three years into the Petro government, interdiction of cocaine has continued to increase, and is on pace to reach record levels in 2025, according to Defense Ministry statistics (see chart). Nevertheless, interdiction and drug seizure tallies are ambiguous measures of drug control success. Increased interdiction numbers can result from intensified enforcement efforts, but may also indicate that there is more cocaine being produced and trafficked. Greater vulnerability to interdiction may also incentivize drug trafficking networks to hedge against product losses by producing more cocaine. Colombia has also maintained a robust tempo of extraditions of suspected drug traffickers to the U.S. justice system.
Beyond that, however, the government has not sufficiently implemented its ambitious alternative program.
Forced coca eradication has declined, which is positive, as these aggressive programs have caused social discord and environmental harm in areas where farmers grow coca in small plots. As they are rarely coordinated with improved state presence, basic services, or community coordination in long-abandoned territories, forced eradication campaigns have never yielded more than modest reductions in the coca crop, as the chart below shows clearly. Peru and Bolivia have experienced a similar lack of results from past aggressive coca eradication.
In coca-growing areas, where most farmers do not earn enough to lift them above the poverty line, harsh confrontations with security force-led coca eradication teams have declined, and there has been no effort to return to aerial herbicide fumigation, a cruel and ineffective practice that cannot be resumed without undergoing a rigorous process laid out by the country’s highest court.
The Petro government, however, did not accompany its eradication drawdown with a quick delivery of alternatives. Substitution programs and state-building efforts, including those outlined in the peace accord, continue to lag significantly behind. Residents of coca-growing territories face fewer punitive approaches, but now encounter a government strategy that can only be described as “none of the above.”
Neither the UN Office on Drugs and Crime nor the U.S. government has published an estimate of the size of Colombia’s coca crop in 2024. As of the end of 2023, 16 months into Petro’s government, the UN estimated that 253,000 hectares of the crop existed in Colombia, a record. There is little reason to believe that the crop may have declined significantly since then.
These governance challenges go well beyond drug policy. The Petro government’s management shortcomings have hindered its pursuit of results on a host of measures, including improving security for vulnerable communities, protecting social leaders and human rights defenders, improving living standards for ethnic communities, and implementing most aspects of the 2016 Peace Accord.
This outcome is not the result of malice: the Petro government has no incentive to disappoint or ignore political supporters in historically conflictive territories. Instead, the cause is more prosaic: a lack of managerial capacity and uncertain leadership.
People with good intentions—many from civil society—but little knowledge of the workings of government were handed great responsibilities, but little guidance from a president who issued edicts on Twitter and shook up his cabinet and inner circle every several months. Leadership changes have been constant, as have been abrupt policy shifts and legislative gridlock amid a shrinking governing coalition. This has been compounded by an increasingly dire fiscal reality that has starved ambitious programs of resources.
Even when run by career technocrats in the past, Colombia’s state has been slow-moving and often distant from the realities of its rural zones. The Petro government’s inability to gain traction compounded this. A partial result is that the area of Colombia with effective, low-impunity state presence has shrunk since 2022, while the power and criminal governance of armed groups have grown.
This has become a sizable political liability for the Petro government. Parts of the country that suffered the most from armed conflict, such as Cauca, Putumayo, and Catatumbo, had voted overwhelmingly for the president only to see a disappointing response on priorities like land tenure, ethnic communities’ rights, and crop substitution, amid a deterioration in security.
This grim outcome has cost Petro’s government much popularity and will hamper the governing coalition’s electoral prospects next year. It makes no sense, though, for the United States to multiply the harm by punishing Colombia’s government and people.
What to do instead
“Certification has occasionally helped US policymakers advance hemispheric counternarcotics goals, but these benefits have been outweighed by the detrimental political impact of an unpopular and unilateral policy, which has not kept pace with the problem it is trying to solve,” noted a paper by career Foreign Service officer Annie Pforzheimer, which appeared as an appendix to the U.S. government’s 2020 Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission report.
The entire decertification process is a drug-war relic that does more harm than good to U.S. interests. It should be abolished immediately as part of a broader rethinking of the United States’ unsuccessful, blinkered, and often violent approach to both drug trafficking and organized crime in general.
While it still exists, the decertification process should not be used to shame and punish, as the message it sends is toxic and counterproductive. This is especially true for a nation like Colombia, with which the United States has long maintained deep political, economic, societal, and security ties. Decertification, especially without penalties waived, would be a deeply regrettable mistake.
Instead of decertifying, the U.S. government can help Colombia protect its people and weaken the dominion of criminal and guerrilla groups during the Petro government’s final year in office. The Trump administration can speak plainly about the failures of the past few years, but must avoid a “lost year” of stubborn estrangement while governance and illegal activity worsen.
- Both governments are overdue for a high-level dialogue about how to move forward on areas of agreement. That should happen immediately. It should focus on both countries’ priorities, not just dubious or failed U.S. preferences like “fumigate farmers,” “bomb civilian targets,” or “boost numbers of low-level arrests.”
- It is vital to restore U.S. assistance to Colombia before the consequences worsen further. The areas of the country hit hardest by this year’s deep aid cuts are the territories with the least state presence, where drug and other illicit economies thrive amid an absent rule of law and a lack of other opportunities. Withdrawing U.S. resources represented a stunning and perplexing retreat from these strategic regions. The same applies to aid cuts to Colombia’s justice system, which is essential for taming corruption and curbing illicit financial flows, as well as to civil society’s vital oversight and participatory role. A security-only strategy, undone by its own blind spots, is ineffective and demands too much avoidable sacrifice of police and military lives.
- Encourage the Petro government to pursue its own stated objectives, as outlined in its 2023 drug policy and security documents, as well as in the 2016 peace accord. Many of these commitments involved governing territory, fighting corruption, reducing impunity, and empowering communities, all of which would, if implemented, reduce drug flows and other organized crime activity with far less confrontation.
- Never lose sight of the enormous role played by illicit actors that don’t currently appear on the U.S. government’s terrorist lists, many of which have had close relations with corrupt government officials since long before Gustavo Petro’s presidency. These include the Gulf Clan and other groups descended from the cartels and paramilitaries of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as the powerful but less visible political and business figures who maintain a foot in both Colombia’s legal and illegal economies. No successful strategy can ignore these actors or those who collude with them.
- Thinking beyond Colombia, Congress and the executive should move to replace the entire certification process, which is rarely used, has brought few benefits, and is an unnecessary irritant in bilateral relationships. The 2020 Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission report called for replacing the entire certification process with “a global report reviewing country efforts to counter trafficking and other transnational crimes, including U.S. policies.”
- Recognize that the illicit drug problem will remain with us as long as drug prohibition remains with us. The Petro government deserves credit for pointing to the pernicious impacts of the global drug prohibition regime, which has empowered organized crime and made drugs more deadly. Short of a fundamental shift beyond prohibition, Colombia will need to define and implement policies that can minimize drug-related harms through evidence-based approaches to reduce violence, extend the rule of law, and improve rural livelihoods and well-being.
