COCAINE EXPANSION IN PERU RAISES FEARS OF GLOBAL SPREAD / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ( A MUST READ )

LATIN AMERICA NEWS
.
Updated June 25, 2012, 11:29 p.m. ET
.
Cocaine Expansion in Peru Raises Fears of Global Spread
-
By JOHN LYONS

.

Junior Davila

Men in a coca plot near Cushillococha, Peru.

CUSHILLOCOCHA, Peru — The soggy lowlands here were long seen as inhospitable for growing coca potent enough to make cocaine. The plant mainly thrives at steeper, higher elevations of the Andes Mountains, where it was first cultivated by Indians many centuries ago.

More coca, the raw material in cocaine, is being grown in the Amazonian lowlands of Peru, close to smuggling routes into Brazil. Video and reporting by John Lyons.

But new techniques have given this Ticuna Indian village near the banks of the Amazon River in Peru a surprising distinction in the global drug trade: It is now home to some of the world's fastest expanding plantations of coca, the raw material in cocaine. The United Nations' annual drug report, to be published Tuesday, is expected to document the big changes in the global cocaine business that are helping drive coca cultivation—and cocaine consumption—deep into Peru's Amazon near its border with Brazil.

Traffickers are adapting to declining cocaine consumption in the U.S. by pioneering new markets and smuggling routes in places such as Brazil, recent U.N. data show.

In May, Brazil deployed troops to back up Federal police charged with preventing smuggling along its Amazonian borders. "Where do you think all this production is headed?" said Sergio Fontes, who commands Brazil's Federal Police in the state of Amazonas, which borders Peru.

Loreto Region Forestry Department

Cocaine paste seized by Peruvian police.

.

Ticuna farmers, clad in rubber boots to protect their ankles against snakes, show how lower Amazon coca may eventually lead to a more globalized cocaine industry. Their success has big implications for the rain forest, its people—and potentially the cocaine business itself.

Today, the entire world's coca grows in the Andean nations of Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. The coca being grown in the Amazon region of Peru could just as easily be grown across the border in Brazil.

The economics of cocaine are changing in a way that could provide incentives to grow it outside of Latin America entirely, such as Africa or Asia. West Africa has become a transfer point for South American cocaine headed to fast-growing markets in Europe. It could someday make sense to move some production there, much the same way poppies came to the Americas from Asia decades ago, allowing Mexico and Colombia a share of the U.S. heroin market.

"Right now, South America meets global demand, but as long as it's not difficult to export the know-how and technology, there is always a risk that it moves elsewhere," said Flavio Mirella, who runs the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Lima, Peru, and is responsible for surveying Peru's coca grows.

     Loreto Region Forestry Department

     Police with kerosene used to process coca into cocaine.

New coca patches in Ticuna towns helped drive a 70% expansion of total coca cultivation last year in Peru's "lower Amazon River" region, a sparsely populated area near Peru's border with Brazil and Colombia, according to current U.N. estimates.

A decade ago, virtually no coca was grown in this area. Now, the deep Amazon accounts for some 8% of Peru's coca acreage, these estimates indicate, and that number is likely to rise.

Coca won't grow just anywhere. It is a tropical plant and grows best in an equatorial band around the globe. Though coca would theoretically grow well in Hawaii, much of the soil in the U.S. doesn't have the acidity levels the plant needs. In other parts of the country, overnight freezing temperatures would kill the perennial plant.

.

The arrival of the coca economy at the floor of the Amazon basin marks a troubling milestone for one of the world's most fragile ecosystems. Slash-and-burn coca agriculture is already a cause of deforestation in Peru's lower Amazon region, local environmentalists say.

Traffickers dump leftover kerosene, acid and other chemicals used to make cocaine into pristine rivers. Indian tribes with few resources can be pulled into the drug economy, or in some cases even pushed off their land.

Loreto Region Forestry Department

Police inspect crude cocaine.

"It's getting more violent by the day, and indigenous populations are getting involved in a vicious cycle," said Peruvian National Police Gen. Carlos Moran, who ran a coca-eradication operation in the region last year.

Amazon coca already has brought change to Cushillococha, a collection of tidy shacks around a sun-baked concrete square unreachable by road from the rest of Peru.

It is a source of income for a poor community with little access to government services, and separated from bigger economic centers by long boat journeys, says Walter Witancourt, a town leader. Other tribe members, however, said coca also brought alcoholism and cocaine use, and placed Ticuna villages in the crossfire of rival traffickers.

Mr. Witancourt, a slim man in his 60s with a sun-worn face, said some locals started planting coca around five years ago. They knew it was for illegal cocaine, but they needed cash to purchase basics like food and construction materials for their meager dwellings.

Thanks to coca, some families have sent children to study in the regional capital of Iquitos, he said.

"We have been abandoned by the government for 50 or so years," Mr. Witancourt said. "Our children also have the right to study, to become lawyers or professionals."

In Peru, coca mainly grows at elevations of the Andean mountains between 6,500 and 1,700 feet. It used to be widely believed that potent coca couldn't be grown on the floor of the Amazon basin.

A variety of the coca plant that thrives naturally in the lower Amazon jungles, called ipadu, has a 10th the potency of highland counterparts, for example. What's more, coca's roots rot and die in wet earth, a serious farming issue in the flood-prone Amazon flatlands.

In 2000, a U.S.-backed military crackdown on coca farming in Colombia provided more incentive for coca farmers to push eastward, deeper into that country's jungle, to escape pressure.

That year, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright flew to Brazil with a warning that the crackdown could push Colombian coca all the way to the country's Amazon border with Brazil, creating a security issue.

Now, more than a decade later, a version of Ms. Albright's dire prediction is coming true. "It was a myth that coca would only grow in the Andes or the High Jungles. It grows. I've seen it," said Ivan Vasquez, the governor of Peru's sprawling Amazonian region of Loreto, where Cushillococha sits.
.

.

Forestry officials who work in Peru's Amazonian region of Loreto say 2010 U.N. estimates of about 3,200 hectares under cultivation there are too low.

The regional government produced a report this year claiming that thousands of acres of smaller coca plots are flourishing undetected in jungle areas outside U.N. monitored areas. Their evidence: complaints from logging executives kicked off their concessions by coca farmers in areas supposedly devoid of coca.

The arrival of coca at the floor of the Amazon shouldn't be a surprise, according to Emanuel Johnson, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist who did extensive research on coca in South America and at a U.S. coca greenhouse facility in Beltsville, Md., during a three-decade career.

In the mid-1990s, Dr. Johnson showed scientifically that one variety of coca, Erythroxylum coca coca, keeps its potency as it moves downhill. Clandestine growers in Colombia were discovering much the same thing in the country's eastern jungles, and that is the variety that is growing today in Peru's lower Amazon.

Rather than elevation, Dr. Johnson found, the acidity level of the soil is the key factor for producing coca powerful enough to make cocaine.

Maintaining the right acidity levels in the soil can be tricky in the lower Amazon, since rains can rinse away acidic top soils on deforested land. To maintain acidity, fertilizers must be brought in by boat.

"My experience was the drug business has amazing logistics. If they need something, they will find a way to get it there, and do it in a way you won't even see it," Dr. Johnson said.

Coca's potential to affect Amazon life is magnified by the region's remoteness. The Nukaks, a nomadic tribe in Colombia's eastern jungles that only made contact with modern society in the late 1980s, were forced off their land in recent years by Colombian coca farmers backed by heavily armed insurgents, according to Survival International, a U.K. group that works with the tribe.

.

Some Nukak tribesmen left the forest for abject poverty on the outskirts of San Jose del Guaviare, the nearest big town. Now, the Nukaks are on a U.N. list of tribes facing imminent extinction.

.

Cushillococha and towns near it are attractive to traffickers because they sit in a no man's land outside the reach of the Peruvian state.

The main form of transportation in the region is by river, but Peruvian national drug police have only one working boat, and no aircraft. When they want to take the boat out, they often have to borrow gas from the local governor, police said.

Last year, Peruvian police conducted a coca-eradication effort in the area using helicopters borrowed from the U.S. and fuel floated up river in blue plastic barrels by Brazilian police. But they didn't touch crop grown by the Ticuna, police said, because a conflict between police and the tribe could have had negative consequences in Peruvian politics.

.

On a recent Wednesday, Cushillococha was a tranquil place. Barefoot children ran by a statue of an Indian in a canoe at the town. There were few young men about—most working in the fields, hunting or purchasing supplies.

The only excitement came when a canoe heavy with a freshly killed alligator pulled up at the town's muddy banks.

But the idyllic scenes mask the darker reality of coca's impact, said two members of the Ticuna tribe who declined to be named. Some years ago, they said, men arrived and proposed setting up coca plantations. They brought seeds, know-how, and the promise of a few hundred dollars per harvest—plus seasonal pay processing coca.

The Ticuna villages were divided, with some arguing that the dangers of close links to drug trafficking outweighed the benefits. The Ticuna knew something of the trade: During a height of drug smuggling in the triple border area, some Ticuna villagers helped maintain a clandestine airstrip operated by one of former Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's lieutenants, the two tribesmen said.

One by one, however, more of the villages started planting, as Ticuna growers gained relative prosperity doing it.

Life began to change, the two men said. Bars opened selling Brazilian and Colombian liquor favored by traffickers. Alcoholism and even cocaine use among Ticuna rose. Shootouts between rival groups terrified locals.

According to the men, tribal elders try to set rules to limit the impact on their societies. They banned hard alcohol and want to require traffickers to pay Ticuna workers in cash—not cocaine. The rules are hard to enforce, but have helped all the same, the men said. Tribal elders couldn't be reached to confirm the account.

In 2010, two boatloads of armed men wearing masks burst into one of the Ticuna villages, called Gamboa, firing as they came. It was 4:30 a.m. and the villagers were made to assemble in a soccer field.

The masked men said they were to set up cocaine processing labs, according to an account by bilingual Ticuna and Spanish teachers who happened to be working in the vicinity. Frightened, Ticuna in Gamboa and neighboring towns vacated their villages.

More recently, they said, Colombian paramilitary fighters, groups that waged war against left-wing rebels before turning to other businesses like extortion, have entered the scene. They demand some villages pay a tax on their coca sales.

"Right now what you have over there are basically poor farmers growing coca. If we let this go too long, one day we will come back and find that other groups equipped for war have moved in, and we will find it hard to get them out," said Mr. Fontes, the Brazilian Federal Police commander.

.

—Ryan Dube in Lima contributed to this article.

.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved