The fumigation succeeded, for a time, in destroying the coca crops in Putumayo and elsewhere. But Hernandez, who spoke by phone from Mundo Nuevo last month, says it also destroyed subsistence crops, preventing the villagers’ from making a living in any other way. Right-wing paramilitary groups, which threatened to kill villagers who didn’t pay taxes or sell them their coca crops, simply moved to other areas to repeat the same tactics. Nearly all of the town’s 5,000 residents, including his four siblings, left to find work in different cities, joining the millions of Colombians displaced by 56 years of armed conflict in their country.

“Plan Colombia” officially ended in 2015, when the Colombian government reached a historic peace agreement with the country’s largest leftist guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But two decades later, the threat of fumigation is back—and could depend on the U.S. election.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump publicly urged Iván Duque, Colombia’s conservative president, to once again ramp up coca eradication using the same controversial spraying methods. “The United States believes a carefully run, limited, aerial eradication program is essential to meeting our joint goal to cut coca production to half of 2017 levels by 2023,” a State Department spokesperson said to POLITICO Magazine in a statement.

The Duque administration, in turn, is pushing Colombia’s highest court to lift restrictions on fumigation that the court put in place in 2015. And Defense Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo recently said Colombia had seven U.S.-donated planes on hand that have been adapted to resume fumigating as soon as possible. “The enemy is not glyphosate. The enemy is drug trafficking, which kills, deforests, constantly causes destruction. We need to spray quickly,” Trujillo told Colombian magazine Semana. In the meantime, the Colombian government is increasing manual eradication operations, sending in security forces to rip out or spray crops by hand.

At a “Latinos for Trump” roundtable in Miami in late September, Trump boasted to Colombian Americans in the room (“Anybody from Colombia? You know what’s going on there, right?”) of his administration’s efforts to combat drug trafficking. But in conversations in Bogotá, the nation’s capital, fumigation is a hotly controversial topic—among proponents who see it as a crucial tool in the fight against narcotrafficking and critics who say it exacerbates the very same problems of violence and deforestation that the drug trade has wrought. A series of hearings over a bill prohibiting the use of glyphosate started in the Colombian Congress last week.

Colombia’s drug policy will not be top of mind for most Americans heading to the polls, but for Colombians, the future of U.S. foreign policy in the region has serious consequences. While the State Department spokesperson said the resumption of aerial spraying is a “sovereign decision” of the Colombian government, Colombian government officials, Nongovernmental organization leaders and researchers interviewed for this article say they anticipate Trump, in a second term, would continue to pressure Duque. To date, the Trump administration has lambasted the 2016 peace deal and pushed for a hard-line coca eradication strategy.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has not put forward an official position on fumigation, and his campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. In an op-ed published on October 7 in Colombia’s largest newspaper, Biden called Plan Colombia “one of the most successful and bipartisan American foreign policies of the last half century.” But many here predict a President Biden would pressure Colombia to fully implement other aspects of the peace accords, including crop substitution and rural development, instead of putting a single-minded focus on coca eradication. Colombia’s fumigation strategy historically has depended on U.S. funding, and experts are skeptical it would be able to resume without that support.

And, if Colombia’s coca crops continue to thrive unabated, so too will the flow of cocaine into the United States, the world’s top consumer of the drug.

“The expectation in the Colombian political world regarding what may happen with the presidential election and the United States next November is very great,” says Antonio Sanguino, a Colombian senator from the center-left Green Alliance Party who is a member of the committee that oversees international affairs and national defense. “It is also going to define the agenda, we believe, of the United States towards Colombia.”

That matters to Hernandez, too. He says people in Putumayo, where he still farms, worry that “if Trump wins, the fumigation is a done deal.”

By the end of Plan Colombia, the country had seen a large drop in homicides, kidnappings and massacres. The program has been praised by Colombian and American leaders for helping to weaken the FARC to the point that the group agreed to disarm.

But a central and controversial feature of Plan Colombia was the aerial aspersion of glyphosate, an herbicide that the World Health Organization in 2015 deemed “probably carcinogenic.” The fumigations often drifted into noncoca growing areas, destroying subsistence crops along with coca and resulting in mass displacements, as well as damage to water supply, biodiversity and public health. Researchers have found that exposure to glyphosate in Colombia resulted in an uptick in dermatological and respiratory illnesses, as well as miscarriages.

With the signing of the 2016 peace accords, the Colombian government agreed to help transition coca-growing communities to other crops. Yet, cocaine production in Colombia has increased since 2012 as farmers have relocated their coca crops to areas like national parks that are off limits to fumigation—which the U.S. Government Accountability Office has acknowledged.

Nidia Quintero, national delegate for the Coordinator of Coca, Poppy and Marijuana Growers of Colombia—an organization of Afro-descendant, indigenous and farmer communities that advocates for the implementation of the peace accords—adds that in many areas, the money flowing from the coca economy traditionally has filled in gaps left by the state, funding services like power plants, running water, roads, bridges and schools. “So, then when the government arrives and fumigates to get rid of the cultivation, but not to solve the underlying economic problem, what it has done is make it so people emigrate to other departments, to other territories and begin the cultivation of the coca plant again,” she says.

Colombia’s centrist previous president, Juan Manuel Santos, suspended fumigation in 2015, after the WHO’s health declaration, and the country’s Constitutional Court later imposed strict restrictions on spraying. (Colombia currently has 231 pending lawsuits regarding the use of the chemical.) But in 2019, the Duque administration began pushing the court to lift its restrictions, calling fumigation a necessary tool to confront drug cartels. Last month, a judge in the coca-growing region of Nariño ruled that during the coronavirus pandemic, government authorities can conduct virtual community consultations—a required step before fumigation. Still, many have questioned how it will be possible to hold virtual meetings in areas without internet access.

Fumigation for now remains prohibited. Duque said this past week, “I’m not saying I’m a fan of aerial spraying,” but also: “When we have to use aerial spraying, we’ll have to use it.” The Colombian Defense Ministry said in a statement to POLITICO Magazine that the intensification of fumigation and manual eradication during the years of Plan Colombia was responsible for a reduction in hectares of coca, and that Duque’s government “is taking on drug trafficking in a comprehensive manner.”

While a spokesperson said the ministry does not comment on foreign elections, others government figures say the Colombian government is watching the U.S. presidential race closely, expecting that its outcome will help determine Colombia’s next move on coca eradication.

“The policy of the Duque government is a photocopy of what [the United States] says. It’s that simple,” says Eduardo Diaz, who oversaw the crop substitution program under the Santos government. Sanguino, the senator, used the phrase “total replica.”

Trump has criticized Duque for not doing more to stem the drug trade and threatened to decertify Colombia as a partner in the war against drugs. In a meeting with Duque at the White House in March, Trump told him, “If you don’t spray, you’re not going to get rid of [the coca]. So, you have to spray, with regard to the drugs in Colombia.”

Some have surmised that Duque and his party have bet their political strategy on aligning themselves with Trump, and fear Colombia would have a more antagonistic relationship with a Biden administration. Fumigation took place under the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president, but opponents of the strategy say they are hopeful a Biden presidency will bring a greater emphasis on human rights.

“Biden certainly was a big supporter of Plan Colombia and the initial expansion of fumigation. I know that some of his staff when he was vice president were in the camp of, ‘Let’s not beat up on Santos for suspending it,” says Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization. “But I don’t think they ever went on record saying we don’t have to fumigate.”

Diaz says he hopes a Biden administration would bring a renewed commitment to the peace agreement, which includes crop substitution agreements, and an emphasis on targeting the strongest “links in the chain”—narcotraffickers, money laundering, chemical precursors—rather than farmers. “Those who are not sure what Biden is going to do at least have the doubt,” Diaz says. “There is the expectation that it will change.”

Some Democrats in Congress already are pushing for change. In July, the House of Representatives passed two amendments as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. A bill proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) would prohibit the United States from funding aerial fumigation of coca crops. Another, proposed by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), would trigger an independent investigation of U.S. aid to Colombia going back to 2002.

“I have never seen such a scenario so dependent on the electoral result of the United States,” says Ricardo Vargas, a drug policy researcher at the Transnational Institute, an international think tank. “In the case that Trump is not elected, these policies are going to suffer a very strong blow.”

Experts are skeptical that the Colombian government will be able to renew glyphosate spraying soon, or to the same extent as before, because of the strict restrictions imposed by the Constitutional Court. It’s also unclear whether the United States would pay this time around. The State Department spokesperson said the United States would “play a supporting role in a Colombia-led aerial eradication program.”

Quintero predicts that if aerial spraying restarts, it would be met with fierce opposition from local communities that are more organized and educated than they were 20 years ago. In the meantime, the main tool the state has used since glyphosate aspersion was outlawed has been forced manual eradication, in which army or police forces rip out or spray coca crops by hand. But this method is also dangerous for both communities and security forces, and has resulted in at least four deaths and 25 injuries since March, according to local news reports.

Forced manual eradication has shot up in recent months compared with previous years, an uptick several experts attributed to increased American funding for eradication teams, and pressure from the White House to reduce coca cultivation and production by 50 percent by 2023. The United States has continued to provide more than $1.2 billion in aid to Colombia since 2017, with more than $300 million going toward anti-narcotic efforts, including manual eradication. The number of U.S.-funded coca eradication teams in Colombia has increased from 24 at the end of 2018 to 100 in 2019. The manual eradication operations have also raised concerns about the spread of Covid-19, as security forces enter communities often hours away from health facilities.

While the total area of coca cultivation in Colombia has decreased from about 417,000 acres to 380,000 acres between 2018 and 2019, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime researchers found that crop productivity and production of cocaine have increased by about 1.8 and 1.5 percent, respectively, at a time when manual eradication was in effect.

“At the moment, the government is cornered by the demands of other governments and by local demands because of the increase in [coca] crops,” says Isabel Pereira, lead drug policy researcher at the Colombian human rights nonprofit Dejusticia. “So, it resorts to the way out that looks the easiest and the one that gets immediate results.” Other proven methods like crop substitution, land titling, and providing road, water and sewage infrastructure to remote areas are more complex and take more time to implement, Pereira says. Isacson also says that foreign donors are ill-equipped to carry out such thorny tasks.

Pedro Arenas, co-founder of the drug policy group Viso Mutop Corporation and former mayor of San José del Guaviare, a coca hot spot, says there is little progress to show from the past 40 years of U.S. efforts to combat narcotrafficking. Colombia continues to export most of its cocaine to the United States. “Unfortunately, pressure from the United States has historically not helped to obtain successful results in the fight against drugs,” Arenas says. “If these pressures continue, we are warning that the drug market will remain intact, but social unrest will increase.”

For Hernandez, the return of fumigation could spell ruin. He decided to stay back when much of his community was fleeing two decades ago. He couldn’t see himself living in a city, working as someone’s employee, leaving the family farm to be taken over by the same paramilitaries that had wrought so much destruction, including killing his mother.

He ended up getting a degree in agriculture, and two years ago, he took part in a substitution program, ripping out his coca crops by hand. He says he has been able to earn enough selling peppers to support his wife and 18-year-old son. But he fears that if fumigation resumes, the spraying campaign won’t spare him and his farm, or the 2,300 remaining residents of Mundo Nuevo.

“If they come to fumigate again, I will be left with nothing,” Hernandez says. “Fumigation has always been what we fear most around here.”