Peru sees cocaine making a comeback

After a lull, production is rising, feeding demand in Brazil, Europe and East Asia, officials say. With flashy cartel men replaced by a piecemeal network, the trafficking is harder to combat.

By Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 23, 2008

SANTA LUCIA, PERU — Rustic mule trains ferry vital chemicals to clandestine jungle labs.

Booby-trapped fields ward off intruders.

Trekkers never seen on the Discovery Channel backpack the prized finished product on epic journeys from steamy Amazon hideaways to chilly highland distribution depots.

And a shadowy remnant of the notorious Shining Path rebel army, led by a charismatic man named Artemio, uses its muscle to pocket a fortune in a sinister protection racket.

Peru's cocaine industry, the world's largest and most violent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is again on the upswing. Plots of coca bushes, whose leaves yield cocaine, have increased by about one-third since 1999, to about 127,000 acres, according to Peruvian and United Nations estimates.

And this time, the traffickers may be more difficult to combat because the flashy kingpins from Colombia have been replaced by a piecemeal network, a sort of gold rush of international entrepreneurs.

Production is still well below the record highs of the early 1990s, and neighboring Colombia has surpassed Peru as the global cocaine leader, supplying 90% of the U.S. market, according to the State Department. Moreover, President Alan Garcia is a staunch foe of the drug.

"Peru will not resign itself to be a country of narco-trafficking," vowed the pro-U.S. Garcia, who took office in 2006.

But Peru, the world's No. 2 supplier, feeds a booming demand in Brazil, Europe, East Asia and as far away as Australia, authorities say. The density of coca plantings has doubled in some cases, experts say, and the fertilizer-nourished leaf now yields a greater proportion of cocaine alkaloid, the active ingredient in cocaine.

A wave of drug-related lawlessness -- assassinations, ambushes, threats against prosecutors -- has fanned fears of the kind of narco-instability that afflicts Colombia and Mexico. The Tijuana cartel is suspected in the 2006 slaying in Lima, the Peruvian capital, of a judge hearing a case against an alleged cartel capo.

And renewed militancy among the peasants who grow the coca leaf has sparked road closures and violent clashes with law enforcement officers.

The Garcia administration initially agreed to suspend eradication efforts, a mainstay of the U.S.-backed anti-drug policy. But Garcia later reversed course and even suggested that clandestine laboratories be raided and bombed. With U.S. aid that totals about $50 million a year, Peru has trained and deployed hundreds of anti-drug police officers.

"If we don't kill the danger now," Garcia declared, Peru could be confronted with "an insurgency as large as occurred in our neighboring country" -- a reference to Colombia, where cocaine underwrites guerrilla armies.

Former Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi has warned of the corrosive effect of a burgeoning drug trade. "Its tentacles always reach to the halls of the highest authority," he said.

During the 1990s, U.S.-backed enforcement efforts chased much of the coca trade to Colombia. Now, some say, the wheel is turning: Pressure in Colombia is shifting production here.

But today's tableau is distinct from the brazen scenario of the late 1980s and early '90s.

Gone are the Colombian drug barons swaggering around in opulent jungle redoubts such as the nearby town of Uchiza, once dubbed the world cocaine capital, with its gaudy discos and bordellos. Replacing the Colombians is a multinational network that reaches from the Amazon basin to a globalized market.

"We're up against an army of ants," said Gen. Miguel Hidalgo, who heads Peru's national anti-drug police.

Authorities here have identified smuggling rings from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, among other countries. A Peruvian gang allegedly headed by a petite woman known as Floricienta (after the lead character in an Argentine soap opera of the same name) is said to control a massive chemical-supply network.

Today, Peruvian traffickers produce pure cocaine for export, not the paste that was once regularly shipped to Colombia for final processing.

U.S.-supported police efforts have shut down clandestine landing strips and pinched road access to the isolated planting districts on the Andes' lush eastern flanks. But ever-adaptable traffickers have expanded cultivation zones while employing pack animals and mochileros -- backpackers -- to maintain the illicit flow.

Negotiating extreme terrain, low-tech legions use mules to haul in the essential chemical precursors, and cocaine-laden backpackers stealthily travel age-old Inca trails beneath the canopy, creating invisible contraband thoroughfares.

"Everything is now done on a small scale, a lot of little pieces," said Col. Whitman Rios, head of special operations at the U.S.-supported anti-drug base here in the Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru's most notorious production zone.

This is an area of hypnotic natural beauty, where the mighty Huallaga River meanders through luxuriant hills and sumptuous flatlands like a chocolate-colored pretzel in a vast sea of green. From the air, there is no hint of the battles raging amid the verdant expanses.

On the ground, government forces deploy against targets gleaned from satellite imagery and informants. Then, Vietnam-era U.S. helicopters ferry in "eradicators" armed with metal tools designed to yank coca plants from their roots. Unlike Colombia, Peru bans chemical spraying; it is all done by hand.

Coca growers, known as cocaleros, have devised a crafty countermeasure: Some plants are rigged with homemade bombs; rat traps serve as triggering devices.

"I reached for the bush and it exploded in my face," said Jose Angel Solano Gomez, 40, an eradicator who lost his left eye and suffered other injuries in an encounter with a pipe bomb attached to a coca plant. He says he was thrown three yards into the air.

In the last two years, 73 eradication workers have been wounded and two killed, the government says. More than two dozen police officers have died in drug-related violence.

Flanked by armed escorts, eradicators set out in the stifling heat, like an odd amalgam of ancient and futurist warriors: They don helmets, eye-protection gear and bulletproof vests and, when needed, carry 10-foot lances that provide some distance from booby-trapped shrubs. Paramedics tote antivenin for snakebites and medication for blast and gunshot wounds. Teams of U.S.-trained bomb dogs sniff the fields.

"The campesinos say we're taking away their livelihoods," said Hugo Gozar, 50, a veteran eradicator, referring to the farmworkers.

Throughout the Andean Amazon basin, the imperative of the marketplace pushes peasants to the dependable coca plant. About 65,000 Peruvian families make a living off the coca leaf and trafficking, according to a U.S. State Department report released last month.

Alternative crops such as oil palm and cacao have met with some success, U.S. officials say. But many impoverished farmers insist that no legal product can replace the myth-shrouded bush and its profitable harvests.

"Here, there is no alternative to coca," said Juan Leon Echegaray, a father of six and a cocalero near Tingo Maria. "They come and they offer us a few chickens and some cacao. How am I to survive on that?"

Despite the cocaleros' hostility, authorities managed to eradicate about 27,000 acres of coca last year in the Upper Huallaga. But that only kept pace with new plantings, often in previously eradicated zones.

Many cocaleros have migrated to ever-more-remote patches of the Apurimac and Ene river valleys known in narco-parlance as "liberated zones."

"The narcos and their sicarios [hired killers] act in these zones with complete impunity," said Rospigliosi, the former interior minister. "They've bought off local officials and have complete control."

The flourishing narco trade, authorities say, is stimulating a fresh incarnation of the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, which terrorized the nation before being beaten down in the 1990s. Shining Path was never vanquished in coca country, where the rebels have long imposed "taxes" on traffickers, timber harvesters and others.

The Sendero band along the Huallaga is led by the elusive "Comrade" Artemio, a veteran guerrilla who commands somewhere between a few dozen and more than 100 armed men, authorities say.

Following the blueprint of Colombian guerrillas, police say, Shining Path cadres are deep into the coca trade, ambushing police, targeting eradicators and killing suspected informers. The guerrillas also provide rolling security for cocaine-laden backpackers and secret drug labs, where handwritten signs warn recruits that loose lips can cost them their heads, literally.

Like their Colombian counterparts, authorities say, senderistas are integrating vertically: Insurgents have moved into the production side, planting coca, processing leaves and smuggling.

"Shining Path isn't about ideology anymore," said Gen. Juan Zarate, who heads Peru's eradication effort. "Now it's all about the narco-business."

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Special correspondents Felipe Paucar in Tingo Maria and Adriana León in Lima contributed to this report.

Brazil Pursues Crackdown on Loggers After Surge in Cutting

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 21, 2008; A01

TAILANDIA, Brazil -- The Brazilian government has launched an aggressive crackdown on logging in the Amazon, an operation that pits environmental regulators against people who say they depend on those protected resources to survive.

After three years of declining rates of deforestation, satellite images released in January showed that as much as 2,700 square miles of land in the Brazilian Amazon had been cleared in the final five months of 2007 -- a rate that would represent more than a 60 percent increase over the five-month average of the previous year.

The government quickly declared a moratorium on logging in the hardest-hit areas, including this town, which sits about four hours by car from the mouth of the Amazon River. Officials estimate that 70 percent of the population of about 65,000 here depends on the wood industry. Some work for big logging operations. Many more are like Ediline Natos, the wood industry's version of sustenance farmers.

Natos, 18, stood motionless in the door of her slat-board house here last week, watching a line of trucks rumble to a stop on the isolated dirt road out front. Dozens of federal police spilled out, protected by national guardsmen wearing bulletproof vests and bearing machine guns. Soon, environmental regulators armed with metal poles began destroying her livelihood: seven brick ovens used to bake wood into charcoal.

"These ovens are illegal, so we have to do it," Juner Caldeira Barbosa, a federal police commander, informed Natos.

About 35 percent of all logging here in the state of Para feeds charcoal ovens. That charcoal is purchased by companies that resell it for use in steel production. The two biggest importers of that charcoal are China and the United States, according to environmental officials here.

After Natos's ovens collapsed in shifting heaps of smoke and ash, police tried to comfort her. It didn't work.

She said her husband was away for the day in the city, her eyes welling up as she thought of his return. The ovens, she explained, cost $300 each to make. When the police searched the house, they found her husband's chain saw and confiscated it.

"This is going to be a problem," she said, wiping away a tear. "I have no idea what we are going to do. This is how we survive."

They live miles from their nearest neighbor, so they would likely have to move to find new work that is both legally sanctioned and economically viable. Or they could wait a few weeks until the police and regulators shift their focus elsewhere and rebuild the ovens. The companies that profit on their charcoal might finance the rebuilding.

Just before the police and inspectors drove away, one of the environmental agents told Natos that she would be fined about $600 for each oven she tried to rebuild. He also said that they found some cages behind the house. The birds inside were her pets.

"Those are illegal, too," he said. "So we opened the cages and set them free."

Her face was blank as they walked to their trucks. She might have been sad, or simply stunned.
Spotty Enforcement

About 25 sawmills operate near Tailandia, and inspectors in recent weeks have found that most -- in one way or another -- violate the law. Since Feb. 25, the inspectors have levied more than $2 million in fines here, confiscated more than 8,000 cubic meters of illegal timber and destroyed more than 800 unlicensed charcoal-producing ovens. Those destroyed ovens alone would have consumed about 23,000 young trees in one month, according to average production rates.

All of that represents a minuscule fraction of the deforestation in Brazil, where most of the Amazon forest is located. After three years of declining rates of deforestation, cutting has spiked sharply nationwide. The 2,700 square miles cut in the last five months of 2007 followed the clearing of 4,300 square miles during the previous 12 months, according to government figures.

Demand for the illegal wood and charcoal is only one factor contributing to the cutting. Brazil's Environment Ministry places more of the blame on farmers who clear forest plots to create soybean fields and cattle ranches. Officials say that ranching and farming are responsible for up to 80 percent of total deforestation nationwide. Brazil is the world's leading beef exporter, and a recent agricultural boom has it poised to surpass the United States as the world's top soy exporter.

The combination of factors has made illegal logging a consistent economic opportunity for the millions living below the poverty line. Enforcing the law is spotty at best for regulators, who can monitor only a small fraction of the Amazon region at a time. For years, their work has been further undermined by widespread allegations of bribery and corruption.

Since January, the government has banned all logging in 36 municipalities throughout the country. Fines for illegal cutting have been stiffened. Officials also have tried to expand the scope of potential violations. For example, slaughterhouses that process meat from illegally cleared ranches can be cited.

The Brazilian government is studying the economic potential of sustainable logging operations in the areas targeted by Operation Arc of Fire. But officials had no intention of waiting for those studies to be completed before going after violators.

"This is the most important challenge we have -- to transform an economy that's been based on a predatory process since, well, forever, and turn it into a sustainable one," said Joao Paulo Ribeiro Capobianco, the country's deputy minister of the environment. "To do that, we have to stop the illegal activities first. You can't stimulate sustainable logging if you have another business nearby operating in a different way and putting wood in the same market."

Many Brazilians will need some convincing if they're going to play along. Before the federal police and national guard arrived in Tailandia, thousands of residents had rioted.

Fabricio Fran¿a, one of the six environmental inspectors in the city at the time, said that the tension began when he and his colleagues began to confiscate wood from loggers. Residents started to gather in the streets, inviting confrontation.

"We got a call on the radio from a local police colonel who told us we should try to leave town," Fran¿a said. "The colonel told us, 'There are about 3,000 people in the street and we can't hold them anymore.' "
Expired Licenses

When environmental inspectors arrived at the gates of a large lumberyard outside Tailandia last week, they found a sign erected by their own agency claiming that the business adhered to sustainable logging practices.

It was an old sign. The sawmill was shrouded in smoke from charcoal ovens that burned near the line of the forest. Open fields were littered with scrap wood. Truck beds were piled high with cut logs.

The lumberyard's manager soon arrived to find dozens of police and inspectors eating lunch on the property. When they asked to review his permits, he appeared irked. The papers showed that the site had permission to operate 49 charcoal ovens -- not the 79 that were burning nearby.

"And these licenses have expired," explained one of the inspectors, pointing to a date written near the top.

In addition, the inspectors said they strongly suspected that the company had been exceeding its cutting limits. All around the grounds, vast stretches of forest had been recently cleared.

Police and inspectors have been assessing the area by helicopter, trying to spot such cutting. It's not difficult.

From the air, patches of light green can be seen among the darker patches of dense forest. As the aircraft descends closer to the tree cover, random stacks of hardwood come into view in the middle of the "virgin" forest. Narrow roads have been cut through the forest to reach those harder-to-spot areas. This type of specialized extraction is not included in Brazil's current deforestation statistics, which track only clear-cutting.

"The loggers are getting so good at this that they also fly over the areas, spot areas where a few expensive noble woods -- like mahogany and peroba -- grow, and then they mark the locations with GPS," said Bruno Versiani dos Anjos, the environmental protection agency's coordinator for Operation Arc of Fire. "They calculate whether or not it is financially sensible to cut a new road through the forest that exists solely for the purpose of getting to those few trees. And then they do it."

The inspectors drove the lumberyard manager to Tailandia to officially serve notice that the company would be investigated for possible criminal charges. The convoy of police trucks rolled through town, attracting suspicious stares from residents.

Later, they arrived at the police and environmental inspectors' temporary headquarters. A sign on the building used to label it as the town's Hall of Justice. Now that sign is unreadable. Residents had torn down most of the letters.

Colombia Says Rebels Sought to Make Dirty Bomb

By SIMON ROMERO

CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombia added a new accusation against the FARC rebel group on Tuesday, saying Colombian forces had found evidence that the rebels had been seeking the ingredients to make a radioactive dirty bomb.

The accusation, made by Colombia’s vice president, Francisco Santos, at a United Nations disarmament meeting in Geneva, represents a sharp verbal escalation surrounding the three-country dispute involving Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. The quarrel began over the weekend when Colombian forces hunted down and killed a Colombian guerrilla leader on Ecuadorean soil.

Material found on a laptop computer recovered in that raid provided the basis for Mr. Santos’s accusations about a dirty bomb, a weapon that combines highly radioactive material with conventional explosives to disperse deadly dust that people would inhale.

“This shows that these terrorist groups, supported by the economic power provided by drug trafficking, constitute a grave threat not just to our country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America," Mr. Santos said in a statement that was posted in Spanish on the disarmament conference’s web site. The rebels were “negotiating to get radioactive material, the primary base for making dirty weapons of destruction and terrorism,” he said.

It was unclear from Mr. Santos’s statement whom the rebels were negotiating with.

Mr. Santos based his claim on information provided Monday in Bogotá by Colombia’s national police chief about a deal involving the FARC’s negotiations for 110 pounds of uranium.

The tension further escalated when President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia said Tuesday that he would file a complaint with the International Criminal Court against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, accusing him of providing financial assistance to the FARC, which stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Colombia’s largest rebel group.

In another reaction to Colombia’s cross-border raid, Elías Jaua, Venezuela’s agriculture minister, said that Venezuela was planning to close its border with Colombia to halt commercial trade.

On Monday, Ecuador broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia, and Venezuela expelled Colombia’s ambassador and other diplomats.

The three countries have been swapping accusations of treachery and deceit in the dispute over the killing of the guerrilla leader, Raúl Reyes, by Colombian forces.

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, in ordering the expulsion of the Colombian Embassy’s diplomatic personnel, said it was acting “in defense of the sovereignty of the fatherland and the dignity of the Venezuelan people.”

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who expelled Colombia’s ambassador over the weekend, went a step further on Monday by breaking off diplomatic relations. The move was not unexpected after his claim that Mr. Uribe of Colombia was lying about the nature of the raid.

Venezuela and Ecuador sent troops to the Colombian border on Sunday in response to Colombia’s military raid on the rebel encampment in the jungle about a mile inside Ecuador. Colombian forces killed 21 guerrillas in the FARC.

In addition to killing Mr. Reyes, Colombia said it had recovered his laptop computer. Its contents have since been at the center of several allegations.

At a news conference in Bogotá, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, Colombia’s police chief, accused Venezuela of channeling $300 million to the FARC, based on what he said was information obtained from Mr. Reyes’s computer.

General Naranjo also said computer documents showed financial support from the FARC for Mr. Chávez of Venezuela, going back to the time Mr. Chávez spent in prison after an unsuccessful coup attempt in Caracas in 1992.

“This implies more than cozying up, but an armed alliance between the FARC and the Venezuelan government,” General Naranjo said.

Venezuela’s government, which sent tank units to its border with Colombia in a response to the Colombian raid, denied aiding the rebels. “We are used to the Colombian government’s lies,” Vice President Ramón Carrizales said.

General Naranjo displayed photographs and documents he said had been taken from Mr. Reyes’s computer, but the context of the information was unclear.

Ecuador also rejected claims by Colombia of ties with the FARC, and sent 3,200 troops to Sucumbios, an Amazonian province near its border with Colombia where the attack on the FARC’s camp took place.

Mr. Correa, the Ecuadorean president, said the Colombian rebels had been killed in their sleep “in their pajamas,” and not in the heat of pursuit as Colombia’s security forces had said. Ecuadorean emergency officials recovered several wounded members of the FARC, transporting them to hospitals in Quito.

Faced with one of Latin America’s worst diplomatic crises in recent years, the Organization of American States said it would convene a meeting in Washington on Tuesday to try to prevent an escalation of the dispute between Colombia, a staunch Bush administration ally, and the leftist governments of Ecuador and Venezuela.

Even as Colombia’s government offered details on the FARC’s relations with Venezuela and Ecuador, Colombian officials said Monday that they would not send more troops to the borders with the two countries in response to the mobilizations ordered by Mr. Chávez and Mr. Correa.

Because of the FARC’s resilient history at the heart of Colombia’s war, it has had contact with insurgencies and governments throughout Latin America and beyond, including the United States, which classifies the FARC and other armed groups in Colombia as terrorists.

For instance, in 1998 a Clinton administration official, Philip T. Chicola, then the State Department’s director of Andean affairs, had a clandestine meeting with Mr. Reyes in Costa Rica in an effort to establish a way of communicating with the FARC during times of crisis.

The meeting was described in a diplomatic cable written by Mr. Chicola in January 1999 and declassified in 2004. Also present at the meeting was Mr. Reyes’s wife, Olga Marín, who is believed to be the daughter of the FARC’s top commander, Manuel Marulanda, and also reported to be present, and possibly wounded, in the raid on the jungle camp on Saturday.

The Bush administration on Monday reiterated its support for Colombia’s struggle against the FARC and cocaine trafficking, but called for a negotiated solution to the crisis.

“This, for us, is an issue between the governments of Colombia and Ecuador,” said Tom H. Casey, deputy spokesman at the State Department, in a briefing to reporters on Monday in Washington. “We believe it’s appropriate for them to work that out through diplomatic discussion.”

Still, what began over the weekend as an operation by Colombian forces in Ecuadorean territory has evolved into a wider regional matter.

“Our view of this issue right now is that there is no doubt that there is a territorial violation and we condemn it,” said Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, speaking to reporters in Brasília. “It raises insecurity problems in all countries of the region, mostly in the smaller ones.”

And amid the Colombian accusations, Mr. Chávez remains at the center of the increasing tension, with his political opponents here criticizing his decision to mobilize troops and fighter jets in a show of Venezuelan force.

“If anyone has to protest, it is Ecuador’s government, as the military incident took place in Ecuadorean territory, not ours,” Teodoro Petkoff, the publisher of the newspaper Tal Cual, said in an editorial. “Venezuela has nothing to complain about.”

Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, and Uta Harnischfeger from Zurich.