Cocaine is now Colombia's top export: inside the $15bn trade
Inside Colombia's Cocaine Factories
Since 2024, cocaine has overtaken oil as Colombia's biggest export, with the country supplying about 70% of the world's cocaine. Danish photographer Mads Nissen has followed the drug's trail from remote Andean farms to urban slums and narco-submarines on the Pacific coast. His images reveal a trade that touches every corner of society—from forced coca cultivation to gang violence in Cali—and the failure of government crackdowns, even as a new president promises 'all-out war' with US backing.
“Many people say, in the daytime they come in uniform, in the night-time they come without. But it’s the same people, and sometimes even with the same guns.”