Prosperity, Corruption : Coca Valley: Peru Jungle Surrealism

Peasant Alberto Valdivia came to the violent jungle to ride the coca tiger. It ate him.

Valdivia is out of crop and out of luck. His three children are hungry--victims of their father’s poor-man’s avarice and of what he regards as the United States’ self-righteousness.

“Four years’ work gone in one morning,” Valdivia lamented. “They destroyed my crop, and they left misery.”

Valdivia’s hillside pioneer farm is barren now. He lost 2 1/2 acres of coca, his only cash crop, to a U.S.-financed eradication team. “It is like a cemetery. Everybody is leaving.” Kicking a lumpy sack, he remarked acidly, “This is a month’s food.”

Valdivia can read and write and is uncommonly well-spoken for a small Peruvian farmer. He is an ambitious man, like thousands who have abandoned the sere Andes for the coca lure of Peru’s jungle frontier.

His fake leather boots and minor-designer shirt, fading now, are bittersweet legacies of a good harvest. In two years of sweat, Valdivia conquered a patch of jungle outside Tingo Maria. In the third year, his patch of coca brought more money than he had ever seen. Now it is gone.

“You know,” he said, “there’s a place called Kuwait where they pump oil from under sand that’s not good for anything. What would the people do if somebody made the oil illegal?

“God made this valley for coca. I plant coffee; it gets knee-high and it dies. I plant cacao and it turns yellow. Coca--that’s what grows, that’s all that grows. But no, you can’t grow coca. That’s illegal. The bastards come and tear it out. Where will it all end?”

Coca Flourishes

The valley that God made for coca is called the Upper Huallaga, green and fierce on the eastern slopes of the Andes above the Amazon basin. On hillsides that are steep and sandy, wet and well-drained, flourishes the world’s finest coca--the raw material for cocaine.

“The valley is a sea of coca, a sea of dollars,” said Lt. Col. Javier Marius, the frustrated commander of a U.S.-sponsored anti-coca police force headquartered here.

Surrealism in jungle green, the valley is a state within a state, a rich and violent microcosm of the distortions that cocaine has brought to people and institutions in the Andean nations of South America.

The Peruvian flag flies over the Upper Huallaga, but it is coca that rules. In the valley’s boom towns, the politics, the economics, the very rhythm of daily life--and death--dance to coca’s tune.

“The trouble is that coca corrupts everyone,” said Alejandro Costa, chief of the eradication program.

Hostage to coca’s caprice, four different armed forces patrol the valley. They shoot at one another to advance conflicting goals. Bullets fly, coca prospers.

Two of the forces--the Peruvian military and a U.S.-equipped and -financed drug unit of the Peruvian national police--view the jungle through different ends of the same telescope. Their missions are opposed, and there is no love lost between them.

The third force, which is fanning the fear, the hatred and the greed that coca nurtures, are the ruthless Maoist guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), down from the high Andes.

Then finally, there is a part-time drug runners’ army whose brigands are the jungle’s enforcers and who keep the three other forces off balance with terrorism-on-command.

Police Are Hated

Naturally, people in the valley hate the anti-coca brigade of the national police. Its principal job is to protect the on-again, off-again eradicators who swarm, 900 at a time, through local plantations.

Created at U.S. instigation, the drug police have been accused of everything from extortion to murder. Marius, their commander, says that, on investigation, most of the complaints turn out to have been contrived as disinformation by the dopers.

Popular unrest, aggravated by the eradication, which began in May, 1983, encouraged formation of a jungle branch of the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas, who have marauded through the Andes farther south for the last five years. The guerrillas have proved no more successful in provoking a general uprising here than in the mountains, but their terror spurred the establishment in August, 1984, of an emergency zone under military control.

The zone commander is barrel-chested, white-thatched Julio Carvajal, a two-star army general. The general carries his hate for the guerrillas with him on sweaty morning jogs, a German shepherd at his side and his service revolver neatly wrapped in a plastic bag so it will not be slippery if he needs it.

The army’s counterattacks are thought to have reduced the guerrillas to two mosquito-ridden columns of around 40 men each.

Just as the drug police have no responsibility for hunting terrorists, Carvajal has no mandate to operate against the coca trade. He says that the army has neither responsibility nor legal authority to act against the smugglers. That does not trouble him.

Tacit Acceptance

“We provide security that allows peasants to return to their farms. Unfortunately, once they get there, they grow coca,” Carvajal told a recent visitor to his headquarters outside town. In off-the-record briefings for Peruvian reporters, Carvajal likes to explain that coca means work for poor people and desperately needed foreign reserves for a poor country. Cocaine, he says, is a problem for the gringos.

As commander of the emergency zone, Carvajal decides which areas are safe enough for the eradication teams and which ones they must avoid because of the guerrillas. That is a life-and-death decision for coca growers, and its implementation fuels a local conviction that “they only go after the little people,” as hapless Alberto Valdivia put it.

“It is the campesino with a small plot of coca who is eradicated,” Tingo Maria Mayor Ciro Gallegos said. “Then how does he live? Guilty or not, he must live. The largest growers are untouched. People are very resentful.”

In the valley, four families (families “in the Mafia sense,” Marius explained) control the coca industry. They are unimaginably rich by jungle standards. And they are not stupid.

Everybody understands that the presence of guerrillas guarantees the absence of eradicators. So there are real guerrilla attacks in the valley--and there are attacks by smugglers’ irregulars pretending to be guerrillas.

Except that the Maoist propaganda they leave behind is a bit slicker than what the real guerrillas distribute after a typical ambush, it is hard to tell them apart. The coca barons’ riflemen also tend to be better armed, boasting greater resources and firepower than the revolutionaries, or for that matter, the drug police.

“It is hard to know what is ‘narco’ violence and what is terrorist violence,” Mayor Gallegos said.

‘New Death’

One night last year, 15 eradication workers paid $100 a month under the U.S. program died in their bedrolls. The attack, officially attributed to the drug traffickers’ mercenaries, stopped eradication for months. In September, a policeman guarding eradicators died in a fusillade from attackers who left Maoist propaganda behind.

“Every time there is new eradication, there is new death,” said Father Fortunato le Grande, a Canadian missionary who runs Tingo Maria’s best school. Of late, guerrilla violence has receded, and Carvajal says the valley is largely pacified.

The emergency zone continues, though, and the drug traffickers are desperate to keep it. The last thing they want is for the valley to lose its provident guerrillas. If the guerrillas leave, so eventually will the army, whose current presence offers not only security but crop insurance.

At least two towns have rebelled against the drug police. In one instance, enraged townsfolk disarmed a drug police patrol and detained it until the army came. Army units, by contrast, are welcome defenders of the status quo in the valley.

Some people think that is strange, just as they wonder about the flashy new civilian jeeps and pickup trucks that Carvajal and his officers drive.

Of course, the Peruvian armed forces are proud defenders of the national territory. Yet the presence in the valley of 30 to 80 clandestine airstrips used in the coca trade does not awaken patriotic alarm or suggest any threat to Peruvian national security among the valley’s guardians.

About five clandestine flights a day--usually from Colombia--violate Peruvian airspace in order to pick up the coca paste that is the valley’s--and Peru’s--largest export.

But the safety-conscious Peruvian air force does run the Tingo Maria airport with an iron hand. When a reconnaissance aircraft lent to the drug police through the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration flew in from Lima in July, the air force immediately grounded it for improper documentation.

Predecessor Slain

“People like the army. It represents no economic threat,” said Gallegos, a wizened jungle veteran who is new to his post. He is Tingo Maria’s mayor because his predecessor, a folkloric character named Tito Fernandez, who headed the local coca league, was murdered last year.

Gallegos thinks that maybe the drug police set up his friend Fernandez. The drug police say it is not clear whether it was a love triangle, a personal feud or coca that did Fernandez in.

Coca-related killings are a major cause of death in the valley, but nobody keeps track of who gets killed, much less by whom. This is the jungle frontier, after all. It is enough to know that the fish have lately been bigger and more plentiful than usual in the Huallaga River. A lot of people can’t decide whether it is safe to eat the fish, though, assuming that the fish feed on bodies anonymously consigned to the muddy waters.

Conspicuous consumption by the newly rich leaves its footprints all over the valley, but for most who are willing to accept coca’s all-or-nothing risk, the boom can be as deceptive as it is alluring. And only for a relative few does coca mean an escape from squalor.

Cartographer Rafael Rivera walks the valley mapping coca plantations for future eradication. It is exhausting, dangerous work. Four cartographers were murdered at their campsite one night last year.

“The saddest thing is that when the peasants get a lot of money for coca, they spend it foolishly,” Rivera said. “They drink, buy a portable stereo, flashy clothes and perhaps a car. Only a few are smart enough to bank what they earn.”

Jungle settlements shown haphazardly on new maps boast sturdy branches of Lima banks, glistening hotels, big auto dealerships, bustling downtowns with multistory shopping emporiums and the mansions of the coca-rich outside town. They lack running water, sewage, sufficient schools or decent medical care. Most of the time, there is no electricity, leaving the poor in darkness and driving the coca barons to install expensive generators to run their Betamaxes.

Major-league dopers’ lairs like Aucayacu, Uchiza and Tocache do not boast a single paved street. Still, business is business. Private planes chartered by Lima banks fly in across the mountains almost every day with Peruvian currency to swap for coca dollars.

Mostly One-Crop Plots

Nobody here in the jungle knows for sure how much coca the 200,000 residents of the 500-square-mile valley grow. A U.S. aerial survey last year showed coca along with other crops on 14,000 of 15,500 farms on the valley floor. More than half the coca, though, is harvested from hillside plots like Valdivia’s where nothing else will grow.

Eloy Cabrera, field superintendent of the eradication workers, says a valley total of 150,000 acres planted in coca is a conservative estimate. What some people call “Reagan’s matahojas” (plant killers) have destroyed about 15,000 acres in three years. Everyone agrees, though, that many thousands more of the hardy bushes are being harvested in the valley today than when the U.S.-supported eradication teams started work.

Some of the coca is legal for consumption by highland Indians, who have been chewing coca leaves for at least 3,000 years. About 95% of the valley’s growing production, however, is bound for illicit export. It is not hard to understand why.

The Peruvian government’s coca-buying agency pays $3.50 for an arroba (25.3 pounds) of leaves. Smugglers pay $65 for the same quantity. These rewards are such that farmers with growing families need no extension service to decide what to plant.

“Harvesting four times a year, you can get about 40 arrobas a hectare (2.47 acres),” said Marcelo Ispallagi, a neighbor of Valdivia’s. That means earnings of $2,600 per hectare a year.

Ispallagi said the next best crop, cacao, brings a farmer about $450 per hectare a year. Little wonder that a U.S.-sponsored crop substitution program is stillborn.

Le Grande, the Canadian, is a Franciscan priest who is chairman of the local human rights commission. He has watched coca sweep the valley over the last decade.

“I have had peasants ask me to bless huge new trucks they couldn’t drive,” he said. “Many of them don’t know it is wrong to grow coca. It is the best crop. They ask, ‘Why should we grow corn or other crops which have poor prices or no markets?’ ”

Tingo Maria, the valley’s largest, oldest settlement founded 47 years ago, is a potholed city of about 40,000 that is at once ramshackle and vibrant. Coca has brought it wealth, but not much joy. It is encircled by 17 slum neighborhoods with, in the mayor’s words “no water, no light, no nothing.”

In the nearby countryside, 22 rural schools have been closed by violence. Health posts have been abandoned.

‘A Great Market’

“We are victims of many years of government chaos in Lima,” said Gallegos. “One government told us to commercialize rice, but the costs were higher than prices paid us. Then came coffee, but plague killed it. Bananas and oranges are almost always bad. People turned to coca; it has a great market.

“Now, many would leave coca if there was an alternative. There is none. Governments eradicate. They do not plant.”

Among the valley’s many secrets are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of crude, hole-in-the-ground laboratories where coca leaves are made into paste by adding kerosene and sulfuric acid. The coca is so rich it takes only 10 pounds of leaves to yield a pound of paste.

The paste, which flying smugglers so avidly seek for more elaborate refinement farther north, fetches $1,800 in cash per kilo (2.2 pounds) at any neighborhood clandestine airstrip. In thatched-roofed shops along the road through the valley, it is easier to buy kerosene than a soft drink.

Backyard chemistry is not coca’s only spin-off industry. Brigandage is also booming.

One recent morning, a peasant woman, Margarita Guiterrez, prowled angrily through a settlement called Maronilla, where the leading service club is called the Front for the Defense of Coca.

“Our farm is three hours’ walk from the nearest river landing,” Guiterrez said. “If the bandits don’t ambush us on the way over with the leaves, they get us on the way back with the money. Our children must eat. We need security. Where is the law?” she demanded, the sun glinting off her big gold wristwatch.

Last week, a new anti-coca drive called Condor 3 swept through the valley, supported this time by air force helicopters. There were new incidents of violence, fresh tears and more anger.