IN PERU, BATTLE AGAINST FLOW OF DRUGS MOVES TO AMAZON RIVER MAZE

IQUITOS, Peru -- The speedboat roaring up the brown waters of the Nanay
River outside this jungle city last week rode a little low in the water, so
a Peruvian Coast Guard cruiser pulled alongside to take a look at its cargo.

The soldiers found more than 800 pounds of cocaine base packed in 5-gallon
plastic gasoline cans, headed for the Colombian border 100 miles away.

"There's so much moving on the river that if you put a hook in the water
you're going to catch fish," said Maj. Mark McGraw, a U.S. Marine who since
late February has trained Peruvian soldiers and police to fight drug
traffic on Peru's 6,000 miles of jungle rivers.

Since 1995, when Peru began shooting down Colombia-bound planes that
refused to identify themselves or land on command, sales of Peruvian coca
to Colombian cocaine labs have plunged.

The price of coca leaves in Peru has fallen by half, forcing many growers
from the market. In two years, coca production in Peru has dropped 40
percent, pushing it to second place in world production, behind Colombia.

Drug traffickers, however, have not given up. Increasingly, the coca that
once made its way to Colombia by air is moving through the vast Amazonian
river network that links northeast Peru with its northern neighbor.

Peru, with unprecedented U.S. financial help and training, is trying to
stop the resurgence.

Peru "has demonstrated that the battle can be won against an enemy that
doesn't respect frontiers or laws," said U.S. Ambassador Dennis Jett on
Friday, at the formal opening of a joint Peruvian-U.S. river interdiction
training center outside Iquitos.

Now, as the nation's drug war moves to its rivers, "the fight has to be
more flexible," Jett said.

Since February, U.S. Marines, Navy and Coast Guard soldiers have been
training Peruvians in riverine drug interception tactics at a ramshackle
naval base near Iquitos, its trees thick with screaming green parakeets.

The first graduates will become instructors at the school, and a first
class of troops and police bound for Peru's rivers start training in July
and will be working in August, McGraw said.

Young soldiers, their faces darkened with green camouflage paint, are
learning to drive gray metal high-speed cruisers equipped with machine
guns, rocket launchers and night-vision scopes.

They get training in boat repair, communications, weapons, human rights and
preservation of evidence, trainers said. Many are veterans of the nation's
long war against terrorism, which peaked in the early 1990s.

"Narcotics go to a country's vulnerable spots," said Oswaldo Rio, a
Peruvian marine who spent 18 years fighting terrorists in Peru's mountains
and jungles and will be an instructor at the new drug-interdiction center.

Over the course of the five-year, $60 million program, the U.S. will supply
54 new boats, including three large barges to serve as floating bases. Peru
now has just 16 boats in its riverine anti-drug program and few trained
troops.

In Loreto, the Arkansas-size province around Iquitos, the capital of Peru's
Amazon, just 150 anti-drug troops patrol the rivers, McGraw said. "That's
poco gente, almost nobody," said the trainer, who like all the U.S. troops
in Iquitos speaks some Spanish.

Just how much good the patrols will do remains to be seen. U.S. anti-drug
officials have no clear estimates of how much cocaine base is moving down
Peru's rivers, said Randy Beers, a State Department narcotics chief.

Some of the coca diverted from its former air route to Colombia is moving
through Brazilian airspace, beyond the reach of Peru's weapons, he said.
Other coca may be reaching Colombia by truck or on the backs of peasants
traveling Amazon trails.

Seizures like the one last week near Iquitos suggest the rivers probably
represent the cheapest and safest alternative route for traffickers.
Iquitos residents say they have found logs and floating brush on the Amazon
stuffed with plastic packages of cocaine base.

The river interdiction effort "is something we need to try to do," Beers
said. "It's a good start. But the proof will be in the results."

"We're trying to choke as many routes of transport as possible," he added.

U.S. trainers will not participate in drug raids but are expected to stay
in the country for the first two to three years of the program, McGraw said.

Perhaps the toughest challenge facing the new program, apart from trying to
track traffic on Peru's immense river network, will be controlling corruption.

Peru's armed forces, long tainted by drug-related corruption charges, have
tried to stem the problem in recent years. Keeping honest the soldiers who
deal day-to-day with traffickers, however, may prove difficult, officials
said.

"They know they have a problem, and we're not immune either," Beers said.
Controlling corruption "is a constant challenge," he said.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski