PERU PAYS

South America's Hostages And Victims

In its October 1998 annual report the United Nations International Drug
Control Programme (UNDCP) welcomed the successes achieved in Bolivia and
Peru. Peru's policy is to shoot down suspect aircraft and sever the air
link to stop the transfer of coca and basic coca paste (the first stage in
processing it into cocaine) to Colombia. It has certainly had an effect.
And so has the involvement of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. But
they do not tell the whole tale. Far from it.

In the early 1990s Peruvian peasants were growing more than 150,000
hectares of coca. Peru's narco-traffickers were not organised groups, with
their own structures for direct export to Europe or the United States. They
simply provided the raw material to the Cali cartel (Colombia) for
processing and marketing. In 1994-95 that Colombian mafia decided to
negotiate its surrender as a result of governmental and international
pressure. On 6 August 1995,the arrest of Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the
cartel's number two, meant that Cali was finished. According to Ricardo
Vargas, of Accion Andina, a regional group looking for peaceful
alternatives to narco-trafficking and its repression, "Cali bought up 60%
of Peruvian production. Prices collapsed in Peru. Then and only then did
production tail off."

At that time the structure of narco-trafficking was being "democratised".
In Colombia, the Medellin and Cali cartels were being replaced by a number
of less clearly-defined groups that were harder to identify and control.
They were more often equipped with satellite phones and laptops than guns
or rifles. For logistical reasons, it was they who repatriated Peruvian
coca production to Colombia. That explains the dramatic decline in crops in
Peru (only 50,000 hectares in 2000) and the equally dramatic increase in
Colombia. In other words, under Alberto Fujimori, it was not repression of
the peasants or alternative production programmes that led to a decrease in
the land area cultivated, but the break-up of a large mafia-style
organisation at the highest level, and the change in strategy of its
successors.