Peru losing battle of the coca harvest

THE man leading campaigns to eradicate coca cultivation in Peru has a poetic way of describing his job. General Juan Zárate says: "The struggle against coca can resemble detaining the wind."

Coca production is surging in the country's remote tropical valleys, part of a major repositioning of the Andean drug trade that means Peru may surpass Colombia as the world's largest cocaine exporter.

Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking rings are expanding their reach in the country, where two factions of the Shining Path guerrillas are already competing for control of the cocaine trade.

The increase in Peru offers a window into one of the most vexing aspects of the American-financed war against drugs in Latin America, which began in earnest four decades ago. When anti-narcotics forces succeed in one place - as they recently have in Colombia - cultivation shifts to other corners of the Andes.

This happened in the 1990s, when coca cultivation shifted to Colombia after successful eradication projects in Peru and Bolivia. Scholars of the Andean drug war call this the balloon effect, bringing to mind a balloon that swells in one spot when another is squeezed.

"Washington's policy of supply-oriented intervention inevitably improves the efficiencies and entrepreneurial skills of traffickers," said Paul Gootenberg, author of Andean Cocaine.

The balloon effect - and its consequences - is coming full circle in the jungle valleys of central Peru. In late April, a faction of Shining Path, the rebel group held responsible for tens of thousands of deaths from 1980 to 2000 during its war against the government, killed two eradicators and one police officer in central Peru.

The first cocaine boom happened here in the 19th century, after German chemists developed the formula for making cocaine from the coca leaf, feeding a legal trade in the US and Europe. Sigmund Freud was an early user. By the 1970s, with Peru's government outlawing much of the new coca cultivation in the country, Colombian drug lords put in motion another boom, exporting Peruvian coca leaf to cocaine laboratories across the border. Columns of the Shining Path later worked to protect farmers growing coca in the region, consolidating Peru as the world's top grower.

In the 1990s, President Alberto Fujimori militarised the region to crush the Shining Path, lowering cultivation levels. Now many farmers are planting coca once again. "Coca lets us feed our children," said Jacinta Rojas, 45, a grower near Tingo Mara, explaining that coca can be harvested up to five times a year, compared with one or two harvests for crops like cacao.

The resurgence of Peru's cocaine trade is obvious in Tingo Mara, a town that suffered when coca growing plunged during the 1990s. Now motorcycle taxis swarm the streets and restaurants cater to free-spending farmers. Nightclubs feature Peruvian bands belting out cumbia, the folk music transplanted from Colombia, with lyrics that celebrate and lament the travails of cocaleros, or coca growers.

The increased cultivation in central Peru contrasts with the situation in Colombia, where cultivation fell 18 per cent in 2008, according to the United Nations. In Peru, cultivation climbed 4.5 per cent that year, capping a decade in which areas under cultivation had increased 45 per cent since 1998. Cultivation is also rising in Bolivia.

Anti-narcotics specialists in Lima, the capital, contend that Peru may have already surpassed Colombia in cocaine exports. "If current cultivation trends continue, we could also surpass Colombia as the world's largest producer of coca leaf by 2011 or 2012, " said Jaime Antezana, a security analyst at Peru's Catholic University.

US president Barack Obama's top drug policy adviser, R Gil Kerlikowske, announced a plan in May emphasising prevention and treatment in the US. But the administration has left financing for eradication projects in the Andes largely unchanged.

"We view drug trafficking in Peru as part of a regional and global phenomenon," said Abelardo Arias, director of the narcotics affairs section at the US Embassy in Lima. "In response to law enforcement pressure in one area, drug cultivators and traffickers switch operations to new territories."

Peru uses some American aid to buy helmets and vests to protect against land mines planted by the Shining Path. Other aid goes to American contractors like DynCorp, which maintains helicopters operating from Tingo Mara.

From one helicopter, General Horacio Huivin, director of Peru's antidrug police, gazed over coca fields, minutes from Tingo Mara. "We have fallen into a vicious cycle," he said, "because we are eradicating in the same places where we were eradicating last year or in previous years."