Forced displacement in Puerto Asís has been characterized by alarming numbers in a relatively small village. During the studied period, there were 36.442 forced displaced cases registered in a town that by 2010 had only 57.000 inhabitants. This happened in a village that was built upon the “coca” economy, and that as a consequence has suffered from the hardest efforts of aerial glyphosate fumigation due to the war against drugs. This paper tries to explain the influence that the eradication of illicit crops could have had on forced displacement between 1998 and 2010: A historical-sociological analysis that shows how these eradication efforts have caused the destruction of an economy that, although illegal supports thousands of families that have not found a reliable subsistence option in the alternative development programs, being forced to abandon their territory.
