JUST one road connects Tumaco, the second-busiest port on Colombia’s Pacific coast, to the rest of the country. Beyond its verges are fields of coca bushes, many of them cultivated by poor people. Yuley Alexandra Ruano’s crop grows behind a beauty parlour she owns on a patch of land she does not. It is fringed by yucca, plantains and a rotting cacao tree. She and her neighbours have signed up to the government’s “comprehensive programme for illicit crop substitution” (PNIS), whose aim is to replace the coca with a remunerative legal crop. But bureaucracy moves slowly. Ms Ruano has yet to see new seeds or the money promised by the government to help with the switch.
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