Coca Won’t Die Easily in Peru

It is not too early at this point to figure out that President Bush’s new drug war strategy will be anything but good news for Peru. Not that good news is to be expected often in this country, suffering as it is from a virtually bankrupt economy and a growing insurgency--both of which may be aggravated by the short- and mid-term results of the Bush plan.

In the new scheme of things, Peru, the source of as much as 60% of all the coca leaves that are converted into cocaine worldwide, is to receive about $68 million for its part in the joint anti-drug effort. That comes to about 0.8% of the $7.9-billion U.S. drug budget for next year. Most of the contribution for Peru will be earmarked for military assistance ($39 million) and law enforcement ($25.8 million, mainly for paramilitary operations), with a token $3.1 million for economic aid.

The emphasis on military assistance is because of the dramatic deterioration of the security situation in the Upper Huallaga Valley, where most of the illegal coca is grown, and where the Shining Path guerrilla movement has interrupted all anti-narcotic activities. Under the new plan, it is hoped that the Peruvian armed forces will regain a level of control that will enable the police to carry out actions against jungle labs and clandestine airstrips, without running into potentially disastrous armed confrontations with the guerrillas.

What this new approach completely overlooks--as the former one also did--is that the coca industry is not only the predominant activity of the Upper Huallaga Valley, employing hundreds of thousands of people; it is also the most important Peruvian export, influencing the nation’s legal economy in a decisive way. As legal business activities suffer from an ever-worsening economic crisis, the coca economy stands firm as the only important growth industry in Peru. Torn by an almost schizophrenic ambivalence, Peru has become quite dependent on the coca income.

In the Upper Huallaga Valley, there is little ambivalence. Coca is a popular cause and the defense of it is the most important factor in the Shining Path’s stunning growth there, in numbers and in strength.

For most of the valley’s farmers--the broad social base at the bottom of the cocaine-trade pyramid--the coca market was the only one that could deliver relative prosperity. The valley was only recently colonized, mostly by peasants who had experienced crushing poverty in Peru’s coastal lowlands. In the Upper Huallaga, they found that credits to cultivate traditional crops were scarce and expensive, markets were far away and capricious, and prices were often below production costs.

It makes only elementary sense, therefore, that an intelligent anti-drug strategy should first address the economic aspect. It should try to offer real, viable alternatives to the coca economy, using police or military repression only as adjuncts to the main strategic thrust. Yet the new U.S. strategy rests on a punitive approach, and the economic assistance is less than an adjunct to it, a microscopic carrot.

The main arguments used against an economic-oriented drug strategy focus on its cost and the uncertainty of the results. If compared with the current strategy for the Andean countries, a program of improving the legal economies certainly would be costly, as it would require at least a tenfold increase in the amount of money now invested in the region. But it would still be one of the cheapest war efforts in history. As for effectiveness, it would have a much better chance than either the former eradication-centered or the current repression-oriented approaches.

As it is, no police or law-enforcement system in the world can be effective against an activity that involves whole collectivities. When it tries to do so, widespread violence is usually the result, as was, and is, the case in Peru.

Violence in the Upper Huallaga, and in the rest of Peru, is potentially much worse than the violence now rending Colombia. There, what you have is confrontation between rogue capitalists and the system. There are no fundamental social, ethnic or religious conflicts, so in spite of the current bloodletting, assimilation of the narco-elites in the span of one or two generations is a likely outcome.

What you have in Peru is an insurgency by a fundamentalist Maoist movement, whose inflexible goal is absolute power through military victory, in order to execute an absolute social revolution. The coca conflict is, for the Shining Path, only an instrument for achieving that goal. But it is using that instrument with dexterity, capitalizing on the repeated mistakes of the Peruvian and American governments.

The Peruvian army, which is belatedly trying to wrest some districts in the Upper Huallaga out of the Shining Path’s control, is attempting to drive a wedge between the guerrillas and the coca farmers and traders. Given the situation, this is a sound approach. But the paradoxical result of it would be that any progress achieved in counter-insurgency would necessarily limit anti-coca activities. Yet it is to facilitate anti-coca activities that the military will get most of the American funding available for Peru.

When confronted with poor strategies, reality comes back, after all, with a vengeance. If the economic aspect is not properly addressed, the new approach will only escalate the current levels of violence, which, among other things, will nullify whatever short-term results are achieved.