Gerardo Moreno is a coca farmer living over 900km from Bogota. It took him three days to get to the Colombian capital by foot, boat and bus. That leg of the journey cost half the air fare to Dublin, where he is a guest of Latin America Week.
"We are so far away the government has never seen us, only Clinton's planes," he says, referring to aerial fumigation that has ruined his (legal) 19-hectare crop of rubber trees that took 10 years to mature along with his coca leaf crop from which street cocaine can be produced.
Campesinos in his jungle region of Cartegena del Chaira have to grow some coca for the drugs market, he says, to survive poverty and "abandonment by the state in this forgotten corner of Colombia". But 11 years ago the locals adopted "crop substitution", one of the alternative concepts of the fight against drugs.
Like 40 per cent of Colombia, Cartegena del Chaira is controlled by the Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. FARC supports crop substitution, though its arms are part-financed by a "war tax" on traffickers.
Although the return is less than from rubber - $540 per hectare per year compared to $780 for rubber - the coca plant can be ready in a mere nine months and there are six harvests a year.
With an EU grant of $25,000, disbursed by the Amazonian Fund, the people built a chocolate factory, grew cocoa for it (as distinct from coca), and had "a very nice experience", says Moreno, a 49-year-old family man. Six months later they got another grant of $26,000 and set up a credit union.
"Then the US gave the order for forced eradication of coca. The chocolate factory collapsed because spraying destroyed almost the entire crop of cocoa," he says. The people are suing the government for the loss of their legal crops and Moreno is going to court for his lost 19 hectares of rubber.
This year's theme for Ireland's Latin America Week, organised by the Latin America Solidarity Centre, is "Combating Drugs and Poverty Across Two Continents". Moreno's itinerary includes meetings, set up by the Dublin CityWide Drugs Crisis Campaign, with communities affected by drug addiction.
With David Martinez (31), a political scientist and lecturer in education in Bogota, he will also meet officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Last week Martinez met a group of women in the Sean MacDermott Street area. He found they tended to tar Colombia's coca-growers and pushers on the streets of Dublin with the same brush.
The visitors reply by stressing the role of the mafias that buy and export cocaine to the United States and Europe; they take the lion's share of the profits, the Colombians say. The local mafias make about 15 per cent of the profits and most of the rest goes to mafias in the US and Europe, Martinez says.
He rails against Washington's military approach to drugs which, he says, is "making national armies in Latin America into armies of occupation" in the countryside.
Moreno wants Washington to realise that "social aid and not this destructive aid is the only way" to eradicate coca-growing.
As an example of double standards in the fight against the drugs trade, Martinez says an American civil servant recently found with two kilos of cocaine got 18 months' house arrest, whereas a campesino coca-grower could get 20 years in jail for the same offence.
He says the fight against drugs "can't be dictated by the US" which is using the war to undermine the sovereignty of Latin American governments, particularly in Colombia.
Asked about the locals' relationship with FARC, Moreno says the guerrillas dispense local justice and policing, "pressurise" the mayor and "punish" corrupt local civil servants, as well as laying down rules to protect the environment from the chemical process to produce cocaine paste, in which form it leaves the area.
"They are not involved in narco trafficking," but extract the "war tax" (about $500 million or 1 per cent of the export trade) from wholesale mafias and they set prices for the campesinos.
With the US Senate expected soon to approve $1.7 billion mostly for military use against drugs, FARC and the Colombian government have proposed cohosting an international conference on the drugs trade to discuss the substitution alternative.
Martinez says he is convinced that in the long term Washington wants legalisation of cocaine when a monopoly has been established. If there was a monopoly prices could stay as high as they are at present, he says. But he sees a double standard in that.
He prefers a quick legalisation with a view to letting prices fall. This would release money saved on the vast apparatus of militarisation which could be invested in rehabilitation of both coca-growers and abusers. He sees the drugs trade as "a crime against humanity".
But he finds the present US State Department system of "certification" of countries for their efforts in the fight against drugs "degrading" and inconsistent.
Colombia is currently certified "for good behaviour" even though its coca production has increased. The reason it has been rewarded is that the US wants to support the peace process between FARC and the government.
In Dublin, cocaine is now cheaper than heroin, and this could have future implications for consumption patterns, says Martinez. But Bolivia and Peru, Colombian neighbours where production has fallen since 1992, "are waiting for the price to go up". Then the growers and drugs lords there will start planting again, he says. Moreno the farmer is cynical. "Fumigation is like a business," he says, intended to move production from country to country and to control prices.