Gender, coca, and the Colombian Peace Agreement: The overlooked gendered dynamics in policy implementation

The 2016 Colombian Peace Process refers to negotiations between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to end a longstanding armed conflict in the country. Drug trafficking was closely tied to the conflict, as FARC financed its military operations by illegally taxing coca cultivation, processing, and trafficking within the territories it controlled (Duncan, 2014; Comisión Histórica del Conflicto y sus Víctimas, 2015; Gaviria & Mejía, 2016).

As a result, drug policy became a central issue in peace negotiations and the resulting landmark Peace Agreement. The parties to the Agreement agreed to rethink the War on Drugs through key principles, including human rights and gender-based approaches.

The Agreement addresses coca eradication and crop substitution, recognizing rural inhabitants, including coca growers, on the basis that they had “previously lacked state protection and been stigmatized in the context of [the] counterinsurgency war” (Ramírez, 2019, p. 140). It also established crop substitution programs to transition coca growers to other types of crops, including coffee, cocoa, and bananas (Cascant-Sempere et al., 2023).

The Agreement’s process of recognition and reconciliation—understood as the acknowledgment of rural communities as victims of systemic neglect and violence, and efforts to rebuild trust between these populations and the state—facilitated the involvement of many human rights movements, including women’s organizations.

The Colombian armed conflict has had a distinct and profound impact on women and gender diverse people (Centro de Memoria Histórica, 2012, 2013), exposing them to forced displacement (Ceballos, 2003; Mejía, 2016) and violence, particularly for those in leadership positions (Centro de Memoria Histórica, 2013; Zulver, 2022). Women, particularly those who are rural, Indigenous, or Afro-Colombian, have also faced widespread physical and sexual violence (Centro de Memoria Histórica, 2012; Mosquera et al., 2018; Camacho, 2022).

In response, the Peace Agreement incorporated a gender-based approach to coca cultivation and drug policy more broadly. The gender-based approach was intended to guide the participatory design of the Agreement in which rural women would be actively involved.

The Agreement also outlined a commitment to the implementation of affirmative measures, understood as actions specifically designed to promote women’s participation in decision-making spaces and to position them as agents of change within the broader peacebuilding process (Alto Comisionado para la Paz, 2016).

Although initially welcomed (Zulver, 2022), nine years later the implementation has fallen short of the expectations of many rural women, particularly those involved in coca cultivation (Pereira & Ramírez, 2020; Parada-Hernández & Marín-Jaramillo, 2021).

In this article, we explore how stakeholders responsible for the implementation of this gender-based approach to the Peace Agreement conceptualize gender and affirmative measures in their professional practices, and the effects of such conceptualizations. We then contrast stakeholders’ responses with interview data from women coca growers and their own descriptions of their lived experiences, needs, and concerns regarding the implementation of the Agreement.

To do this, we draw on Fraser’s (2020) concept of ontopolitically-oriented research and Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to Be Approach to develop a framework for critically examining how policy and research assumptions shape realities for women coca growers.

We use this framework to challenge assumptions about the coca economy and women’s rightful roles while interrogating how stakeholders’ views on the gender-based approach affect women’s lives. We demonstrate the material effects of these issues on women’s lives by analyzing subsequent policy implications, including enrolment in the substitution program and security aspects of the Peace Agreement.