Bolivian ‘Red Zones’--Havens for Drugs

Cocaine traffickers are trying to establish “red zones” in rural Bolivia where hostile crowds keep out anti-narcotics police, Bolivian officials say.

In two recent incidents, hundreds of Bolivian farmers and townspeople turned against police who were hunting for drug traffickers. Several similar incidents over the past two years add up to a troubling trend, officials say.

The most successful “red zones” have been in the Chapare River Valley, a lowland area 200 miles east of La Paz that produces 80% of Bolivia’s cocaine. Bolivia is the world’s No. 2 source of raw cocaine after neighboring Peru.

Col. Nicolas Anaya, a leading anti-narcotics police official in Bolivia, said “red zones” apparently yield the bulk of the raw cocaine that comes out of the Chapare.

“In the ‘red zones,’ only people known by the residents get in,” Anaya told a Bolivian newspaper.

Genaro Marquez, the undersecretary of the interior in charge of narcotics police, also expressed concern.

“There is an evident intention to create free zones for narcotics trafficking,” Marquez said. He added that traffickers are infiltrating civic groups and unions “to interfere with the frontal battle against drugs.”

Authorities accused a farmer’s union leader of encouraging between 1,500 and 2,000 peasants to surround an anti-drug police patrol on June 28 at a Chaparean village named Puerto San Francisco. The farmer’s union, however, said the peasants turned against the nine-man patrol only after it tried to arrest the union leader, Evo Morales.

Four of the police officers, known as the Leopards, escaped into the jungle. An official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in La Paz said the other five Leopards were beaten by peasants before they were rescued.

The peasants burned the police truck that the Leopards were using. Authorities said 30 farmers were arrested, but the crowd helped union leader Morales and a drug trafficker known as “the Priest” to escape.

Virtually all farmers in the Chapare cultivate coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine. Last Tuesday, an estimated 15,000 of them gathered in a peaceful protest at Villa Tunari, where the Leopards have their main base in the Chapare.

The demonstration marked the first anniversary of an attempt by peasants to invade the Leopard base. One peasant was shot to death in the 1988 incident, and 11 others died after running in panic over a cliff into a river behind the base, officials say.

On June 22, the Leopards ran into more trouble when they raided a drug trafficker’s house in the town of Santa Ana de Yacuma, in the Beni district northeast of La Paz. Much of the cocaine from the Chapare is refined in Beni, and Santa Ana is a longtime trafficking stronghold.

“It’s a completely lawless town,” the DEA agent said.

About 30 Leopards were taken by helicopter to the outskirts in Santa Ana for the pre-dawn raid on the house of Hugo Rivero Villavicencia. Rivero has been sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison for drug trafficking, but he has been living openly in Santa Ana.

The Leopards sneaked into town and surrounded Rivero’s house.

“They were met by very heavy armed resistance almost immediately by bodyguards,” said a DEA agent who received a full report from the Leopards.

The Leopards killed four or five men, “all bad guys,” the DEA agent said. They arrested five people, including two wounded men identified as bodyguards.

The others arrested were a suspected Colombian drug trafficker, a 16-year-old boy who said he was a Rivero bodyguard and Fernando Roca Ali, a cocaine buyer for his half-brother, Jorge Roca Suarez, perhaps Bolivia’s leading trafficker.

But Rivero escaped arrest. He happened to be out playing a late game of pool, according to the DEA agent. He said the Leopards did not have time to find Rivero because the gun battle brought out a hostile and armed crowd of as many as 300 people.

The Leopards sent up flares to call in the waiting helicopters for evacuation. As they evacuated, the crowd began shooting, and they were joined by several local marines assigned to a Bolivian naval garrison near town, the DEA agent said.

He said that bullets from the marines’ automatic rifles damaged two of the operation’s five UH-1H “Huey” helicopters, which are on loan from the United States. The navy has started an investigation.