Organizations

09/27/22 President Gustavo Petro

Program
Cultural Baggage Radio Show
Date
Guest
President Gustavo Petro
Organization
President of Colombia

Colombia’s new leftist leader is proposing steps to legalize elements of his country’s flourishing narcotics industry, signaling a potential break with a past hard-line strategy on drugs and a test of Bogotá’s ties with its most powerful ally, the United States. President Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla whose election this summer marked an end to decades of conservative rule in Colombia, described plans that would permit small-scale farmers to legally grow coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine, and address deforestation and climate change by paying farmers not to plant the crop — or anything else — in Colombia’s rainforest.

Audio file