SANTA LUCIA, PERU -- Rustic mule trains ferry vital chemicals to clandestine jungle labs.

Booby-trapped fields ward off intruders.

Trekkers never seen on the Discovery Channel backpack the prized finished product on epic journeys from steamy Amazon hideaways to chilly highland distribution depots.

And a shadowy remnant of the notorious Shining Path rebel army, led by a charismatic man named Artemio, uses its muscle to pocket a fortune in a sinister protection racket.

Peru's cocaine industry, the world's largest and most violent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is again on the upswing. Plots of coca bushes, whose leaves yield cocaine, have increased by about one-third since 1999, to about 127,000 acres, according to Peruvian and United Nations estimates.

And this time, the traffickers may be more difficult to combat because the flashy kingpins from Colombia have been replaced by a piecemeal network, a sort of gold rush of international entrepreneurs.

Production is still well below the record highs of the early 1990s, and neighboring Colombia has surpassed Peru as the global cocaine leader, supplying 90% of the U.S. market, according to the State Department. Moreover, President Alan Garcia is a staunch foe of the drug.

"Peru will not resign itself to be a country of narco-trafficking," vowed the pro-U.S. Garcia, who took office in 2006.

But Peru, the world's No. 2 supplier, feeds a booming demand in Brazil, Europe, East Asia and as far away as Australia, authorities say. The density of coca plantings has doubled in some cases, experts say, and the fertilizer-nourished leaf now yields a greater proportion of cocaine alkaloid, the active ingredient in cocaine.

A wave of drug-related lawlessness -- assassinations, ambushes, threats against prosecutors -- has fanned fears of the kind of narco-instability that afflicts Colombia and Mexico. The Tijuana cartel is suspected in the 2006 slaying in Lima, the Peruvian capital, of a judge hearing a case against an alleged cartel capo.

And renewed militancy among the peasants who grow the coca leaf has sparked road closures and violent clashes with law enforcement officers.

The Garcia administration initially agreed to suspend eradication efforts, a mainstay of the U.S.-backed anti-drug policy. But Garcia later reversed course and even suggested that clandestine laboratories be raided and bombed. With U.S. aid that totals about $50 million a year, Peru has trained and deployed hundreds of anti-drug police officers.

"If we don't kill the danger now," Garcia declared, Peru could be confronted with "an insurgency as large as occurred in our neighboring country" -- a reference to Colombia, where cocaine underwrites guerrilla armies.

Former Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi has warned of the corrosive effect of a burgeoning drug trade. "Its tentacles always reach to the halls of the highest authority," he said.

During the 1990s, U.S.-backed enforcement efforts chased much of the coca trade to Colombia. Now, some say, the wheel is turning: Pressure in Colombia is shifting production here.

But today's tableau is distinct from the brazen scenario of the late 1980s and early '90s.

Gone are the Colombian drug barons swaggering around in opulent jungle redoubts such as the nearby town of Uchiza, once dubbed the world cocaine capital, with its gaudy discos and bordellos. Replacing the Colombians is a multinational network that reaches from the Amazon basin to a globalized market.

"We're up against an army of ants," said Gen. Miguel Hidalgo, who heads Peru's national anti-drug police.

Authorities here have identified smuggling rings from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, among other countries. A Peruvian gang allegedly headed by a petite woman known as Floricienta (after the lead character in an Argentine soap opera of the same name) is said to control a massive chemical-supply network.

Today, Peruvian traffickers produce pure cocaine for export, not the paste that was once regularly shipped to Colombia for final processing.