Pubdate: Mon, 18 Mar 2002
Source: Newsday (NY)
Copyright: 2002 Newsday Inc
Contact:  http://www.newsday.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/308
Author: Letta Tayler

A WEEKLY LOOK AT PEOPLE AND ISSUES IN LATIN AMERICA

Coca Crops Flourishing In Peru Production Soars Despite Efforts To Stop Growth

San Fernando, Peru - Fifteen years ago, government workers tore up Jorge 
Cotrina's coca plants in this fertile jungle hamlet in central Peru. But 
faced with plunging prices for his other crops, Cotrina a few years ago 
resumed cultivation of the plants that yield cocaine.

"If we didn't plant coca, we'd die," Cotrina said, gesturing at his 
hillside of coca plants. "I have five sons. If I didn't grow coca, who 
would pay for their food and shoes and clothes, and for seeds for my other 
crops?"

Despite massive long-term efforts to eradicate coca, production has 
increased - or at best barely decreased - over the past year in Peru, the 
world's second-largest coca grower after Colombia.

The stubbornness of Peru's coca crop is the most pressing issue that 
President George W. Bush will discuss with Peruvian President Alejandro 
Toledo in a visit to this country Saturday. It is among several problems 
that arise in Peru for the U.S. counternarcotics campaign in the Andean 
region, which is the United States' chief source of cocaine.

For the first time, Peruvian farmers are growing poppies, the source of 
heroin, as well as coca. Also, Peru's Shining Path leftist rebels - who 
authorities say earn money by protecting drug-smuggling routes - are 
staging a comeback. And with civil war intensifying in neighboring 
Colombia, officials fear more of the drug trade will spill into this country.

"We are extremely concerned about the increase in Peruvian drug 
production," said Patrice Vandenberghe, head of the United Nations 
International Drug Control Program in Peru. "If demand remains stable and 
production in Colombia is reduced because of fighting, I would expect 
prices to go up and the incentive to grow coca and poppies in Peru to be 
even greater."

Peru's growing drug commerce appears to be the latest case of what analysts 
call the "balloon effect," in which pressure against the trade in one 
country simply pushes it into another. Colombian coca cultivation began in 
earnest after Peruvian crops were almost wiped out in the mid-1990s by 
aggressive eradication, a market glut and a killer fungus. Now, ambitious 
eradication efforts in Colombia and record-high coca prices appear to be 
fueling Peru's new harvests.

"The cultivation levels in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru rise and fall at 
different times, but total production for the three countries remains the 
same as it was a decade ago," said Hugo Cabieses, a top aide in the 
Peruvian drug czar's office. Crop substitution and other programs designed 
to end production "aren't working," he said.

With improved techniques, Peruvian farmers are producing up to four times 
as much coca per acre these days. And traffickers increasingly are 
processing it into cocaine locally rather than exporting coca leaves or paste.

Poppies - a crop authorities believe was introduced by Colombian drug 
traffickers handing out free seeds to farmers - are being grown under cloud 
cover in remote mountains too high to reach with most of Peru's helicopters.

"It's very hard to detect, and it's seven times more profitable than coca 
production," said Vandenberghe.

The United States has spent nearly $2 billion over the past three years 
combatting coca production in the Andes, mostly in Colombia. This year it 
tripled counternarcotics aid to Peru to $156 million. During his visit, 
Bush may announce the resumption of U.S. surveillance flights over Peru to 
spot drug traffickers, administration officials say. The flights were 
suspended last year after the Peruvian military mistakenly shot down a 
private plane, killing a U.S. missionary and her infant daughter.

Half of the U.S. funding this year is earmarked for alternative crop 
development. But in communities such as San Fernando in the Upper Huallaga 
Valley, a region where officials estimate coca production has jumped 10 
percent in the past year, coca farmers bitterly dismissed such plans as too 
little, too late. The local coca farmers' association is organizing 
demonstrations in the Upper Huallaga and in Lima, the capital, to protest 
Bush's visit.

Many crop substitution plans call for farmers to plant cocoa or coffee. But 
people here said prices for those crops have fallen to record lows of about 
$1 per kilogram, while coca leaf prices, fueled by tightening supply and 
rising demand in new cocaine markets such as Eastern Europe and Latin 
America, are reaching a record high of $4 per kilo.

Other farmers pointed out hundreds of acres of barren land where the 
government uprooted coca fields but offered no alternatives.

"They tore out our coca plants more than a year ago and gave us nothing," 
fumed Isabel Claudio, a mother of four who lives in the hills above Tingo 
Maria, the main city in the Upper Huallaga. With no other income in this 
country where half the population lives in poverty, Claudio switched to 
buying and selling coca leaf. As Claudio sat in a line of coca vendors on a 
dusty sidewalk in Tingo Maria, her 6-month-old daughter, Aliyah, amused 
herself by grabbing fistfuls of the brilliant green leaves from her 
mother's sack and stuffing some of them into her mouth.

Coca cultivation for medicinal purposes has been permitted in Peru since 
the Incas. Experts say the leaf, which is chewed or brewed, is far milder 
than processed cocaine. But personal consumption accounts for a fraction of 
the 114,000 acres of the leaf that the United Nations estimates were 
cultivated here last year, up from 107,000 acres in 2000.

With a different methodology, U.S. statistics show coca acreage 25 percent 
less, and basically static last year.

Jim Williard, director of narcotics affairs at the U.S. Embassy, said the 
statistics aren't that grim in the context of the chaos in Colombia, 
soaring coca prices and political turmoil in Peru. Since 2000, this country 
has twice changed its government: President Alberto Fujimori fled amid 
massive scandal and was replaced by an interim government before Toledo was 
elected last year.

"In the future they're going to have to do better," Williard said of 
Peruvian counternarcotics officials, "but they did well to tread water 
during that period."

Eradication and interdiction have been made harder by resistance from coca 
farmers. Around Tingo Maria, farmers boasted they'd driven eradication 
workers from their fields by threatening them with machetes and by 
blockading the main road. Villagers fight police teams that enter remote 
areas to destroy coca processing labs, according to Luis Enrique Gonzales, 
the counternarcotics chief in Tingo Maria. "It's a war," he said.

Officials here say it will take a war on poverty to convert coca growers to 
other crops. Though many coca-growing areas yield succulent fruits, a lack 
of roads in the rugged jungles and soaring mountains make it almost 
impossible to get perishables to market.

Peruvian officials are pressing Washington to lift tariffs on its textiles 
of cotton, which can grow in many coca-producing areas. Drug busters also 
are encouraging high-price specialty products such as gourmet coffee, and 
want to create processing plants for juices and other agricultural goods. 
They want to boost credit lines and build more roads and bridges.

And they want to curb U.S. consumption, without which the coca market 
wouldn't exist.

"It's a tough job, but I think we could see significant progress over the 
next four or five years," predicted the U.S. Embassy's Williard.

That would suit Cotrina just fine. But in the meantime, the farmer said, 
"I'll keep harvesting my coca."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth