This paper empirically studies the effect of the presence of coca crops on the formal labor market in the municipalities of Colombia for the period 2010-2016. To measure the formal labor market, the proportion of people formally employed with respect to the total population of each munici-pality is used. It is found that an increase of one standard deviation in the proportion of hectares cultivated with coca in a municipality reduces the proportion of people formally employed with respect to the total population by 0.004 standard deviations. This result is robust to different eco-nometric specifications, including the introduction of various types of fixed effects, controls, and the use of instrumental variables. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that employment in illicit crops is informal and this employment is a substitute for formal employment. This ex-planation is consistent with other related work and anecdotal evidence.