Pubdate: Thu, 14 Feb 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Juan Forero

FARMERS IN PERU ARE TURNING AGAIN TO COCA CROP

ACHICOTO, Peru -- His farm filled with money-losing crops, Francisco Torres 
had begun to despair that he could ever make ends meet in this green river 
valley in northern Peru. Then tens of thousands of acres of coca were 
eradicated in neighboring Colombia in a vast American-backed campaign of 
aerial fumigation.

The tightening supply has pushed the price of coca to new highs in recent 
months, drug market analysts say, making legitimate crops even less 
appealing while opening fresh opportunities for Mr. Torres and his 
neighbors. Now they are making more room for coca, a crop that Peru had 
made great strides in eradicating in the 1990's.

"We live off coca," said Mr. Torres, 58. "We pay for our harvest with coca 
money. Without coca, there is no life."

In at least two river valleys in Peru, for the first time in years, coca, 
cocaine's main ingredient, is making a comeback, say Peruvian and United 
Nations antidrug officials.

The trend does not mean that antinarcotics efforts in the Andes are 
failing, said analysts who track American antidrug programs. But it does 
underscore how fleeting victories can be in a drug war where national 
boundaries mean nothing to traffickers who can shift their crop across 
remote and poorly policed regions.

While the reasons for the increase in Peru are complex, most experts 
attribute it largely to what they call the "balloon effect," in which 
eradication in one place simply pushes coca growing to another, given the 
continuing demand for cocaine, principally in the United States.

Once-successful eradication efforts in Peru had already shifted much 
production to Colombia, where a $1.3 billion American-financed antidrug 
effort, called Plan Colombia, has now helped nudge coca growing back here 
again.

"The drug mafia knows Plan Colombia would be hard, so they began to 
automatically move," said Ricardo Vega Llona, Peru's newly named drug czar. 
"And how do they give incentives to get people to plant? By paying higher 
prices."

Even in Colombia, which had more than 400,000 acres dedicated to coca in 
2000, new growth has offset eradication efforts, leaving the size of the 
coca crop steady last year, according to new United Nations estimates.

In Bolivia, where the government declared coca nearly wiped out a year ago, 
farmers in the Chapare region have continued planting the leaf, with drug 
traffickers increasingly shipping to Brazil.

Ecuador has also become an important corridor for coca paste shipped from 
Colombia, as well as a port for cocaine bound for the United States via 
Pacific sea routes, said Klaus Nyholm, director for the United Nations Drug 
Control Program in Colombia and Ecuador.

"This is a footloose industry, and by footloose I mean it always goes to 
the path of least resistance," said Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin 
American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami.

In Peru, satellite maps, aerial surveillance and ground assessment work by 
the United Nations Drug Control Program show that the coca crop has 
slightly expanded to cover about 125,000 acres in 2001, from 107,000 in 
2000. Several Peruvian government officials, including Mr. Vega Llona, say 
those preliminary figures are accurate.

The shift to Peru comes after years in which the coca crop here was cut by 
75 percent -- falling to 84,474 acres in 2000 from 318,000 in 1992, 
according to American figures -- with a decadelong American-supported 
program in which the Peruvian forces pulled up coca bushes and intercepted 
and even shot down drug flights and coca farmers were offered alternative 
crops.

The strategy succeeded in collapsing coca prices, destroying coca labs, and 
disrupting transportation routes.

But coca did not disappear. One high-ranking State Department official who 
works on drug issues said coca cultivation was now up 10 to 12 percent in 
two traditional growing regions of Peru, the Upper Huallaga and Apurimac 
valleys.

Other American officials here and in Washington took issue with the United 
Nations findings on Peru, saying American data for 2001 now being analyzed 
shows that eradication efforts in Peru have simply slowed.

The American figures also point to a smaller overall coca crop in Peru than 
the United Nations figures, putting the total crop at 84,000 acres in 2001, 
a reduction of 500 acres from the previous year.

Still, American officials are concerned about the new growth in Peru and 
the rising price for coca leaf, which has shot up to over $4 a kilogram in 
this region from less than $2 two years ago, increasing its appeal over 
alternative legal crops.

"That's really high," said James Williard, director of antinarcotics 
affairs at the American Embassy. "For it to be competitive with coffee or 
cacao, it needs to be around $1."

American and Peruvian officials blame a range of factors for the new 
growth, including the political turmoil in Peru after President Alberto K. 
Fujimori's government collapsed in November 2000.

The suspension last April of a policy that allowed Peruvian Air Force 
planes to shoot down drug flights has also permitted trafficking to pick 
up, Peruvian officials say. The suspension came after a Peruvian fighter 
plane shot down a private plane carrying American missionaries, killing a 
woman and her baby.

American officials, though, remain optimistic about eradication efforts 
here, noting that antidrug aid to Peru is tripling to about $150 million 
this year to pay for the renovation of antidrug aircraft and to finance 
alternative development programs for farmers. More money is likely in the 
coming years for a sustained, long-range program here and elsewhere in the 
Andes.

"It's not a one-year effort," said the State Department official. "It won't 
work in one year, and I think Congress agrees."

Peru's government has increased the police presence in coca-growing 
regions, signed a new eradication plan with the American government and 
declared narcotics a national security issue. American officials in 
Washington also say that the suspension of the aerial interdiction program 
may be lifted later this year.

"I anticipate the possibility of making great headway here in the next few 
years," said John Hamilton, the American ambassador in Lima.

Still, coca and opium poppies, which are also on the rise in Peru, will be 
particularly hard to uproot fully because the recent collapse of coffee 
prices and stubbornly low prices for other legal crops have given farmers 
few options, said Patricio Vandenberghe, director of the United Nations 
Drug Control Program in Peru.

For now, here in the Monzon valley planting more coca simply makes economic 
sense, since prices have reached nearly $50 for 25-pound bales of leaves, 
the highest in Peru because of the quality of the plant.

But the crop has also brought violence and other social ills. Beyond 
leading to renewed signs of drug trafficking, the increased coca plantings 
here and elsewhere have led to a reappearance of Shining Path guerrillas, 
who benefit from the coca trade. The group was nearly wiped out in recent 
years.

In fact, across Peru the police are discovering that traffickers are 
increasingly operating labs that process coca paste into cocaine, a change 
from years past when labs were solely for producing paste that was then 
shipped to refineries in Colombia, said Juan Zarate, director general of 
intelligence at the Interior Ministry.

New trafficking routes, many of them headed into Brazil or to Peruvian 
ports, have also been found. Just last month, six tons of coca paste was 
discovered in a truck in southern Peru, an indication of how ambitious 
traffickers had become.

"This was a signal that the cocaine industry is reactivating," Mr. Zarate 
said. "It put us on the alert."
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MAP posted-by: Beth