09/04/2025
| Photographs by Carlos Villalon for WSJ
Aug. 31, 2025 5:30 am ET
EL TAMBO, Colombia—After years growing the crop used to make co***ne, Mayerly Sánchez tore the plants from the ground, switched to coffee and gave up the bulk of her income.
She worried she would struggle to make ends meet while waiting for the coffee plants to mature. She also feared the gangs that bought her coca would retaliate.
But she had an unlikely partner with deep pockets and a knack for convincing farmers to wean themselves off the co***ne trade: Howard Buffett, the 70-year-old son of legendary investor Warren Buffett.
From his Illinois farm, the idiosyncratic middle child of Berkshire Hathaway’s chief executive has devoted himself to quietly bankrolling a nation-building experiment in Colombia—coaxing coca farmers like Sánchez to step off the lowest rung of the country’s co***ne industry.
“I did it for my children,” Sánchez, 37, said, “and for my own peace of mind.”
Successive Colombian governments, with help from U.S. administrations trying to curb the northbound flow of co***ne, have tried for decades to get farmers to uproot coca and plant legal alternatives. Those efforts have largely failed.
But the $170 million initiative led by Buffett and his partner in Colombia—Mercy Corps, a Portland, Ore.-based group that employs nearly 1,000 people here—has enticed more than 3,200 farming families around El Tambo to uproot their coca plants and grow legal crops instead, even as the narcotic flourishes nearby.
The numbers are relatively small, and it takes years and a hefty financial commitment. But the Howard G. Buffett Foundation’s approach offers some clues as to how a semblance of a state presence might be built in one of the most lawless corners of Latin America.
“We’re trying to chip away at it,” Buffett said. “If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And we’re not sorry we tried.”
The dangers are considerable in the two provinces where Mercy Corps works. Here in Cauca, among the Andes mountain range, militias kidnap soldiers and bomb the army with drones. Nearby in Catatumbo, a strip neighboring Venezuela, thousands have left their homes as gangs launched killing sprees. Coca is the default crop in these regions. Potent new varieties yield five or even six harvests a year. Buyers stand at the ready, purchasing leaves to process into co***ne for export worldwide.
United Nations drug researchers said in a June report that Colombia produced 3,000 tons of co***ne in 2023—a historic high—from a Rhode Island-sized expanse of coca fields. About 230,000 families grow the crop, the government says, up from 100,000 about five years ago.
The Trump administration could soon penalize Colombia when it issues its annual drug-certification report in September. A failing grade in the war on drugs could lead to cuts in U.S. aid or even new tariffs.
President Gustavo Petro’s administration is trying to avert that outcome, said Gloria Miranda, head of crop substitution for his government. Her office offers a modest monthly stipend, tools and technical advice to yank their coca and go legit. A few hundred people have signed on, Miranda said, explaining that the state will respond with roads, schools and security.
“This is about rural development,” she said.
American counterdrug experts and Colombian officials who have worked on coca-substitution programs say farmers won’t drop coca without forced eradication, which governments here rarely employ. Most important, when the Colombian government did try to kill off coca cultivation, it failed to build a presence, except for soldiers and police, leaving farmers beholden to drug gangs.
“You can’t have change if the state is not involved,” said Álvaro Balcázar, who has worked on coca-substitution programs for 40 years. “You have to have the complete state involved, guaranteeing schools, health, connectivity, building roads, which transform things more than anything else.”
Yet in the region of Cauca where Mercy Corps began working seven years ago, an alternative is taking shape.
Nearly 6,000 feet up in the mountains here, Fabian Olarte and his wife, Liceth, run a 34-acre farm.
“When Mercy Corp came here, all this was coca,” said Olarte, recalling the coca lab he had hidden in a thicket of trees.
Now, neat rows of expensive coffee varieties stretch across hillsides. Processing machines strip shell and pulp from beans, which are then placed on drying beds. Olarte stays in close contact with buyers in nearby Popayán and Bogotá.
“I wake up and spend all day thinking of coffee,” said Olarte.
It took him years to get to this point, with agronomists guiding the work and Mercy Corps funding fertilizer, seeds and equipment, including a pulley system to move coffee sacks from a gully to the road above.
It is the kind of long approach that is beyond the reach of elected governments but which is fundamental to getting farmers to abandon coca, Buffett said. “There are no quick and easy solutions,” he said.
After months of meetings with skeptical farmers, Mercy’s staff gives farmers up to six months to remove coca bushes while providing chickens, pigs and food to offset plunging income. In the first two critical years after farmers sign on, Mercy supports crops like cacao, peach palm fruit and coffee, which produce fewer harvests than coca and take longer to yield income. Farmers get help to secure land titles.
“That’s why we have had relative success—because our outlook is seven or 10 years,” said Hugo Gomez, Mercy’s director of rural development.
Of the 1,470 coca-growing families who joined the program in Cauca in 2018, only 4% returned to coca; among the 1,759 who signed on in 2020, just 1.2% reverted.
“That plants the seed for this to happen in other regions—and for real transformation to take place,” said Hernando Londoño, a coca-substitution expert who has worked with two governments. “They started small but have grown and grown and shown the merit of this strategy.”
More recently, another 3,300 growers in Cauca and 4,800 in Catatumbo have swapped out coca, though it is still too early to judge the outcome. Mercy also supports 7,000 other farmers at risk of entering the drug trade.
Sánchez, the farmer worried for her children, said she decided to get involved when she saw a picture of her young son, Yonny, playing among the coca bushes. She said she felt ashamed and cried.
After warming to Mercy’s pitch, she and her husband, Eibar Urrea, received fertilizer, advice from agronomists and tools. On a recent day, she showed off her coffee nursery with 5,000 seedlings nearly ready to plant. Up the hill, 18 pigs rooted in their pen, the largest weighing 500 pounds. Now a community leader, Sánchez manages a 54-mile aqueduct serving 6,200 people.
“What we needed was an option,” she said.
Buffett has visited the programs he funds 10 times, accompanied by heavily armed es**rt. Locals talk of his self-deprecating humor and fondness for Dr Pepper and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which he brings along.
“I have a very sophisticated palate,” he said.
Washington post article Howard Buffett
