Tumaco, Colombia – A thin drizzle falls as farmer Yuli Caicedo crouches at the base of a short, spindly bush and grips its stem.
Wrenching it from the damp earth, she tosses it aside, just as dozens of others are doing. The field around them swiftly becomes a graveyard for uprooted coca plants.
Coca has long been one of the few ways to earn a living on the Awa Indigenous reserve in Colombia’s Narino department.
But the little green leaf, no wider than a golf ball, has fuelled a deadly trade. It is the raw ingredient for cocaine, and Colombia is the drug’s largest source, producing nearly 70 percent of the world’s supply.
How to curb coca production, however, has been an ongoing source of controversy.
For decades, Colombia had relied on aggressive military-led strategies and the forced eradication of coca crops. But Gustavo Petro, the country’s first left-wing president, shifted tack.
He moved away from forced eradication — thought to disadvantage poor, rural farmers — and instead emphasised voluntary crop replacement, while continuing to clamp down on drug traffickers.
That strategy, however, has strained ties with one of Colombia’s closest allies: the United States.
On Tuesday, Petro is set to meet with his US counterpart, Donald Trump, who has pressured him to pursue more aggressive tactics.
But Caicedo, a member of the Awa Indigenous community, is among those taking part in Petro’s push for voluntary eradication.
She told Al Jazeera she knows firsthand the stakes involved in Tuesday’s high-level strategy meeting: Her own father was assassinated by an armed group with ties to drug trafficking.
But she emphasised that farmers like those in her community have few economic opportunities outside of growing coca.
“At the end of the day, we were aware that what we were producing caused violence,” said Caicedo as she yanked up shrubs with a traditional wooden staff dangling from her neck.
“But there was no alternative.”