FARMERS IN PERU ARE TURNING AGAIN TO COCA CROP

ACHICOTO, Peru -- His farm filled with money-losing crops, Francisco Torres
had begun to despair that he could ever make ends meet in this green river
valley in northern Peru. Then tens of thousands of acres of coca were
eradicated in neighboring Colombia in a vast American-backed campaign of
aerial fumigation.

The tightening supply has pushed the price of coca to new highs in recent
months, drug market analysts say, making legitimate crops even less
appealing while opening fresh opportunities for Mr. Torres and his
neighbors. Now they are making more room for coca, a crop that Peru had
made great strides in eradicating in the 1990's.

"We live off coca," said Mr. Torres, 58. "We pay for our harvest with coca
money. Without coca, there is no life."

In at least two river valleys in Peru, for the first time in years, coca,
cocaine's main ingredient, is making a comeback, say Peruvian and United
Nations antidrug officials.

The trend does not mean that antinarcotics efforts in the Andes are
failing, said analysts who track American antidrug programs. But it does
underscore how fleeting victories can be in a drug war where national
boundaries mean nothing to traffickers who can shift their crop across
remote and poorly policed regions.

While the reasons for the increase in Peru are complex, most experts
attribute it largely to what they call the "balloon effect," in which
eradication in one place simply pushes coca growing to another, given the
continuing demand for cocaine, principally in the United States.

Once-successful eradication efforts in Peru had already shifted much
production to Colombia, where a $1.3 billion American-financed antidrug
effort, called Plan Colombia, has now helped nudge coca growing back here
again.

"The drug mafia knows Plan Colombia would be hard, so they began to
automatically move," said Ricardo Vega Llona, Peru's newly named drug czar.
"And how do they give incentives to get people to plant? By paying higher
prices."

Even in Colombia, which had more than 400,000 acres dedicated to coca in
2000, new growth has offset eradication efforts, leaving the size of the
coca crop steady last year, according to new United Nations estimates.

In Bolivia, where the government declared coca nearly wiped out a year ago,
farmers in the Chapare region have continued planting the leaf, with drug
traffickers increasingly shipping to Brazil.

Ecuador has also become an important corridor for coca paste shipped from
Colombia, as well as a port for cocaine bound for the United States via
Pacific sea routes, said Klaus Nyholm, director for the United Nations Drug
Control Program in Colombia and Ecuador.

"This is a footloose industry, and by footloose I mean it always goes to
the path of least resistance," said Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin
American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami.

In Peru, satellite maps, aerial surveillance and ground assessment work by
the United Nations Drug Control Program show that the coca crop has
slightly expanded to cover about 125,000 acres in 2001, from 107,000 in
2000. Several Peruvian government officials, including Mr. Vega Llona, say
those preliminary figures are accurate.

The shift to Peru comes after years in which the coca crop here was cut by
75 percent -- falling to 84,474 acres in 2000 from 318,000 in 1992,
according to American figures -- with a decadelong American-supported
program in which the Peruvian forces pulled up coca bushes and intercepted
and even shot down drug flights and coca farmers were offered alternative
crops.

The strategy succeeded in collapsing coca prices, destroying coca labs, and
disrupting transportation routes.

But coca did not disappear. One high-ranking State Department official who
works on drug issues said coca cultivation was now up 10 to 12 percent in
two traditional growing regions of Peru, the Upper Huallaga and Apurimac
valleys.

Other American officials here and in Washington took issue with the United
Nations findings on Peru, saying American data for 2001 now being analyzed
shows that eradication efforts in Peru have simply slowed.

The American figures also point to a smaller overall coca crop in Peru than
the United Nations figures, putting the total crop at 84,000 acres in 2001,
a reduction of 500 acres from the previous year.

Still, American officials are concerned about the new growth in Peru and
the rising price for coca leaf, which has shot up to over $4 a kilogram in
this region from less than $2 two years ago, increasing its appeal over
alternative legal crops.

"That's really high," said James Williard, director of antinarcotics
affairs at the American Embassy. "For it to be competitive with coffee or
cacao, it needs to be around $1."

American and Peruvian officials blame a range of factors for the new
growth, including the political turmoil in Peru after President Alberto K.
Fujimori's government collapsed in November 2000.

The suspension last April of a policy that allowed Peruvian Air Force
planes to shoot down drug flights has also permitted trafficking to pick
up, Peruvian officials say. The suspension came after a Peruvian fighter
plane shot down a private plane carrying American missionaries, killing a
woman and her baby.

American officials, though, remain optimistic about eradication efforts
here, noting that antidrug aid to Peru is tripling to about $150 million
this year to pay for the renovation of antidrug aircraft and to finance
alternative development programs for farmers. More money is likely in the
coming years for a sustained, long-range program here and elsewhere in the
Andes.

"It's not a one-year effort," said the State Department official. "It won't
work in one year, and I think Congress agrees."

Peru's government has increased the police presence in coca-growing
regions, signed a new eradication plan with the American government and
declared narcotics a national security issue. American officials in
Washington also say that the suspension of the aerial interdiction program
may be lifted later this year.

"I anticipate the possibility of making great headway here in the next few
years," said John Hamilton, the American ambassador in Lima.

Still, coca and opium poppies, which are also on the rise in Peru, will be
particularly hard to uproot fully because the recent collapse of coffee
prices and stubbornly low prices for other legal crops have given farmers
few options, said Patricio Vandenberghe, director of the United Nations
Drug Control Program in Peru.

For now, here in the Monzon valley planting more coca simply makes economic
sense, since prices have reached nearly $50 for 25-pound bales of leaves,
the highest in Peru because of the quality of the plant.

But the crop has also brought violence and other social ills. Beyond
leading to renewed signs of drug trafficking, the increased coca plantings
here and elsewhere have led to a reappearance of Shining Path guerrillas,
who benefit from the coca trade. The group was nearly wiped out in recent
years.

In fact, across Peru the police are discovering that traffickers are
increasingly operating labs that process coca paste into cocaine, a change
from years past when labs were solely for producing paste that was then
shipped to refineries in Colombia, said Juan Zarate, director general of
intelligence at the Interior Ministry.

New trafficking routes, many of them headed into Brazil or to Peruvian
ports, have also been found. Just last month, six tons of coca paste was
discovered in a truck in southern Peru, an indication of how ambitious
traffickers had become.

"This was a signal that the cocaine industry is reactivating," Mr. Zarate
said. "It put us on the alert."