From the jungles of Peru to the streets of the world

Press, 19 December 1985, Page 15

From the jungles of Peru to the streets of the world

As Governments throughout the world improve and increase measures to crack down on drug traffickers, HUGH O’SHAUGHNESSY of the London “Observer” reports on the losing battle being fought in one of the heartlands of the multibillion dollar drugs trade — the lime-green coca plantations of Peru.

The Hotel de Turistas in Tingo Maria is no-man’s land. Amid the fireflies and the croaking of the bullfrogs in the swamp and the odour of rapidly rotting tropical vegetation, all sides gather on its rickety veranda of a warm velvety evening for a Cuba libre dr a pisco sour.

There were the Mayor, the colonel of the Civil Guard, the buyers of cocaine, the sellers, the currency dealers, the United Nations experts, and the men from the United States Embassy in Lima. By convention, no-one gets shot in the faded dining room or arrested in the tatty bungalows. Outside the hotel grounds, it is different. At stake is control over what is rapidly becoming the source of the world’s largest supply of narcotics. Cocaine from Tingo Maria has flooded into the United States. It is now seeping rapidly into Soho and other British drug centres and spreading out over the European continent. Peru is estimated to be producing about 1200 tonnes of cocaine a year with a wholesale value of perhaps $10.5 billion. Despite the oest efforts of the energetic new Socialist Government of the 36-year-old President Alan Garcia, there is no sign that the battle against the narcos, the drug traffickers, is in sight of being won. But the battle goes on. In Tingo Maria itself, and in the towns and villages of the broad valley of the Huallaga River, which flows down from the High Peruvian Andes to the jungles of the Amazon, death is often savage and instantaneous. The cocaine trade is so cheap, simple, and immensely profitable that many experts say that it is impossible to root out. The valleys of the eastern Andes, and in particular the slopes of the Huallaga, are ideal for growing the coca bush whose leaves are the raw material of cocaine. A mature bush can provide five harvests a year of the delicate lime-green leaves, the size of a privet, for a decade or more. It needs virtually no attention.

A couple of acres can provide their owner, whether a local peasant or distant racketeer, with a ton of dried leaves annually. That ton of leaves, roughly trodden underfoot in a mixture of kerosene and alkali, provides a couple of hundred pounds of basic paste. (If you have no kerosene or special

alkali, you can use washing-up liquid and wood ash.) The paste, after careful refining, can yield around 11 kilograms of pure cocaine. There are estimated to be between 120,000 and 160,000 hectares of Peru under coca bushes, some 12,000 of them legally licenced to produce leaves for medicinal purposes. The rest is illegal and produces an avalanche of dollars which no legal crop could possibly provide. Since last year, when the Government of Colombia to the north unleashed a big new offensive against the local drug traffickers after they had murdered the Justice Minister, the trade in Peru has been booming and has become increasingly dominated by Colombians.

Lieutenant-Colonel Javier Marius has his headquarters in a small barracks a few hundred metres from the Hotel de Turistas. He commands the UMOPAR, the Mobile Rural Patrol Unit, a specialised arm of the Civil Guard, the uniformed police force of Peru. He is a barrel-chested, hyperactive man, whose office is lined with religious pictures, scriptural texts and diplomas from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency in equal measure.

Rivalries and jealousies

“In the upper Huallaga, my patch, there are 43 clandestine airfields,” he says. “Every morning between nine and 12, a little fleet of light planes arrives from Colombia, loads up and flies back. If I had two armed helicopters, I could dynamite all the airfields and shoot down the Pipers .and Cessnas. It would be all over.”

But the good colonel has no helicopters, and a complex web of international intrigue, diplomacy, inter-service rivalry, bribery, not to mention the economics of the marketplace, prevent him going for the surgical strike he dreams of. “The more you know about cocaine and the Huallaga,” says the man from the United States Embassy, “the more you realise there are overlapping layers of compli-

cation, like the skins of an onion." To begin with, UMOPAR is an elite corps of the Civil Guard and is often the victim of rivalries and jealousies within the service. But the Civil Guard is only one of three major police forces within Peru, all of which are fighting for their own budgets and glories. Then there is the bitter divide between the police and the armed forces. The soldiers hate the policemen, and the policemen will never forget the various occasions when the army came in to massacre striking Civil Guards. For months now there has been a state of emergency in the Huallaga Valley, and no police officer can carry out any operation without the express permission of the local army general, often only grudgingly given. There are doubts too about the loyalty and integrity of officers and men. President Garcia elected this year on a wave of popularity, has recently retired scores of police generals and colonels, but the doubts remain. If the test of a good police force is that it catches more criminals than it employs, Peru’s major police forces might well not pass muster. Recently, the police caught one of Peru’s prime drug suspects, Reynaldo Rodriguez Lopez, who had been on the run since they raided his headquarters in Lima in August. The Interior Minister commented: “The arrest of this man demonstrates that those who accuse the police of being in league

with the narcos are wrong — at least in this case.” Rodriguez Lopez had mixed in high society and through his network of companies had dispensed favours to senior figures in the Government of Garcia’s predecessor. Rodriguez Lopez is accused of being the Peruvian Godfather. According to the Peruvian Government, however, the ultimate brain behind the Peruvian cocaine trade is a man who lives a highly protected existence in Miami. The shadow of the United States falls heavily on both sides of the battlefield. The mafiosi in Miami take care of the distribution of Peruvian cocaine shipped through Colombia to its principal markets in North America, making in their turn thousands of millions of dollars.

‘Like getting leprosy’

For its part, the Administration in Washington is committed to halting the increasing flood of narcotics from Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and other South American sources. But here, too, rivalry, intrigue, and ineptitude are serving to abort the politicians’ high intentions.

The principal United States antinarcotics organisation is the Drug Enforcement Agency, an arm of the Justice Department in Washington. The D.E.A. is formally barred from operating abroad in its own right and must work through the State Department, which has its own Narcotic Assistance Unit made up of many nonspecialist foreign service officers. “To be assigned to the N.A.U.,” one diplomat reflected bitterly, “is like getting leprosy. You don’t quickly get to be ambassador through the N.A.U.”

The N.A.U. doles out United States Government cash to the D.E.A. abroad, but the D.E.A. tends to pick up the glory of any major bust, because their people are better known. Two months ago, the D.E.A. helped the Peruvians to mount Operation Condor, which annihilated two big cocaine operations on the Amazon near the

border with Colombia. “But they did it with our money,” an embittered State Department man said. Washington is ambivalent about giving the aid the Peruvians say they want. While the United States Agency for International Development has ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into schemes in the Huallaga Valley to find and develop alternative crops and to destroy the coca plantations, the Peruvians have been denied the sort of helicopters with which Colonel Marius says he could clean up the area. President Reagan’s special adviser on drug problems, Carlton Turner, was in Lima a few weeks ago. According to the Peruvians, he announced that Washington would give more aid, only if President Garcia toed the United State line and stopped creating problems for United States banks who are owed money by Peru. Washington hotly denies that such conditions have been imposed. As the generals and politicians in Lima and Washington fight and wrangle and manoeuvre, Marius and his men try to get on as best they can. Half-an-hour’s drive down the valley from Tingo Maria, the UMOPAR are on duty in Aucuyacu protecting the 200 labourers living under canvas and paid by the Peruvian Government to uproot the coca bushes. They need protection. A year ago, a gang went out with their picks to a plantation after the army had forbidden the UMOPAR to accompany them. The narcos came down with machine guns and killed 15 of them in their bivouac.

On the slopes of the Cordillera Azul, the Blue Mountains which form the southern wall of the valley, there are patches of lime green which Marius could not touch, even if he got his men to march there. The owners of the patches have protective orders from the courts preventing UMOPAR or the labourers from touching their bushes. Peruvian law says it is illegal to grow unauthorised coca bushes. It adds, at the same time, that the Government may not take away anyone’s livelihood. The peasants say coca is their only livelihood. The patches are safe while the cases grind through the courts. The narcos can pay expensive lawyers.

‘Why are you killing me?’

For all their esprit de corps and Marius’s electric energy, the spirits of the UMOPAR detachment have been flogging. No rations had been sent down from Tingo Maria for a couple of days, and the pay truck was late. On the main valley road for miles in either direction, Leftwing extremists have painted their slogans on the tarmac. “Soldier, why are you killing me?” “Soldier, desert, and bring your rifle.” Of an evening in the hills above Aucayacu, the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path guerrillas make their unseen presence felt, burning fires in the shape of a hammer and sickle.

Local opinion is that there is no

co-operation between the Left-wing extremists and the drug traffickers. The former are too sectarian and puritanical to approve of a taste for cocaine. The guerrillas do, however, try to capitalise on the discontent of the 200,000 people of the valley, who have seen President Garcia and his agents trying literally to root up their only chance of a better life.

North of Aucuyacu the real drug territory begins. The towns of Tocache and Uchiza are to all intents and purposes under the daily control of the narcos. When Marius gets permission from the army to get a squad of UMOPAR into those places, his men are kept virtual prisoners in their barracks and subjected to threats from narco-organised crowds who often have superior fire power to that of the police.

A fortnight ago, the police caught a narco with a quantity of basic paste and a case full of dollars. As they went to make their arrest, they were surrounded by a crowd of 200, who forced them to release the man. The police reported they just had enough time to throw the case of paste into the River Huallaga. But did they? Was that what really happened? In the Interior Ministry in Lima, on the coast the other side of the Andes, the officials admit that the police at times behave less than impeccably. ‘’My men aren’t little angels,” Marius himself admits. Locals tell how UMOPARs come up to peasants carrying a radio and demand to see their receipt. If the man

hasn’t got a receipt, the UMOPARs say it is contraband and seize it for themselves. Money, too, is filched. There are so many dollars circulating in the Huallaga Valley, the result of cash transactions for coca leaf and basic paste, that it is cheaper to buy dollars in Tingo Maria than in Lima. Consequently, the black-market dealers fly over for currency bargains.

No cocaine no economy

“I’ve known police and army to take money off peasants saying they got it illegally in the black market,” one diplomat reported. In the newspaper stall at Aucayacu they are selling November’s number of the valley’s own newspaper, “The Jungle Police file.” The front page shows close-ups of three corpses of recent narco victims. Beside it is a story of how-the Thatcher Government in Britain is to make a $2.6 million grant to Peru to help in the eradication of cocaine in the. Huallaga.“.‘Great Britain is a country which is "also suffering from the plague of drug addiction,” the - newspaper primly records.

I ask the Mayor what will happen if the coca bushes are ever all grubbed up. “The economy of the Valley would collapse,”, he answers, gloomily. After a moment he cheers up. “It won’t happen for a very long time,” he adds, happily.