Poverty Could Hobble Colombia's Anti-drug Push After Peace Deal
Jose Toconas picks at branches hanging in rows from the roof of his marijuana drying house and smells their spiky flower buds.
In two days he will strip them from their stems, trim the dark green florets into neat little balls and hand them over to dealers working with Marxist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
"This doesn't make me a drug dealer. I'm a farmer," says Toconas, 45, who earns about 2 million pesos ($640) a month growing weed at his small mountain farm in Tacueyo, a hamlet in Colombia's southwestern Cauca province. "They come to my door, pay me and leave. If coffee or beans paid me more, I'd grow coffee or beans, but they don't."
Those simple economics will be one of President Juan Manuel Santos' biggest problems as he seeks to eliminate illegal drug production with the help of FARC rebels now that...
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