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."