Where the cocaine trail begins

Press, 28 April 1981, Page 17

Where the cocaine trail begins

From

HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSY

in Iquitos, Peru

“The foreign debt of Peru is supposed to be about $l2 billion. The Mad Fly says he could pay that off in a year if the Government allowed him to run his cocaine business undisturbed for a year. He could well be right.” Colonel Pablo Acosta, head of the Loreto" department of the P.1.P.. Peru’s F. 8.1., settled back on a rickety chair in his scruffy office over a shop in the main street of this searingly hot city on the banks of the Amazon' and fell to thinking about avalanches of money which the narcotics trade is bringing to Iquitos these days. The .Mad Fly, otherwise known as Manuel Cardenas, has been charged with being the brains behind the drug trade in Peruvian Amazonia, and his arithmetic has to be respected. For the last few years the cocaine trade has been growing so fast in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador that it is today bigger and more lucrative • than almost any other export and is giving the South American underworld and its associates in the United States more money than they could possibly have dreamt of a decade ago. “Last year,” says the colonel, “the P.I.P. captured 416 kilos of coca paste and the Civil Guard another 600

kilos, but that together was only about 5 per cent of what moved through Loreto.” The plantations of coca bushes have been sprouting on the edge of the Amazonian jungle. They lie in the foothills of the Andes which cut this city off from the 'Pacific and from Lima, the Peruvian capital.

There are towns and villages up there, Acosta says, where there are streets of shops selling coca leaves by the sackful. In towns like Huanuco, Yurimaguas and Pucallpa they make a rough cocaineextract from the leaves in paste form, and from there on the traffickers — if they are lucky and most of them are — stand to make enormous fortunes.

In the trackless jungle, the main supply routes are along the tributaries of the Amazon. The Ucayali, the Maranon and the Huallaga, which until recently seldom carried anything more powerful than a dugout canoe, are echoing with the noise of massive speedboats with 200 hp engines which are able to outrun anything that the

Civil Guard or the P.I.P. have. “Our boats with 50hp engines cannot reach them.” the colonel complains. “We set up control points on the river. The traffickers either try to speed past or at night they attempt to drift past like big pieces of driftwood. There are gun battles from time to time. The best way of catching people is through informers.” Once the paste gets to Iquitos it has a chance of being transhipped on to ocean-going vessels which sail down the Amazon and out into the Atlantic or on to the aircraft which link the city with Miami, Brazil or Colombia. A favourite entrepot is Leticia, the only port that Colombia has on the Amazon.

“You get off the plane in Leticia carrying a briefcase and people come up out of the blue and start quoting prices of cocaine paste to you,” a Peruvian hotel owner says. The colonel thinks the U.S. Government should do more to equip the P.LP. with better tools to combat the traffickers. “Most of the cocaine goes to the U.S. and we should have more help from the,” he says, though he adds that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has given valuable help in the past and maintains constant liaison.