Revamped Effort Led by American-Flown Copters Put on Display : Peru Launches ‘Frontal Assault’ on Drug Traffickers

The four American-flown Huey helicopters, with machine-gunner at the doors, set down on a clandestine drug smugglers’ airstrip in the Peruvian jungle, just a few miles from a tar road covered with slogans in red paint saying “Yankees Out.”

Peruvian police in camouflage crouched in the undergrowth and began the countdown. A 40-pound charge of C-4 plastic explosive, buried in the center of the strip, sent a 100-foot-high plume of rocks and sand into the air and left a crater 12 feet deep and 20 feet across. A second blast followed soon after, gouging another hole farther down the strip.

With the destruction of the airstrip--at least for a few days--Peruvian officials this week put on display their two-week-old “frontal assault” on cocaine trafficking in the heart of the richest coca-producing valley in the world.

The centerpiece of the campaign is the rebuilt police base at Santa Lucia, a modern Ft. Apache surrounded by hostile drug runners, coca growers and Maoist guerrillas. At a cost of $400,000 in U.S. funding for fortifications, including mine fields, tunnels, electronic sensors and a mile-long airstrip, the base is the literal front line in the fight against cocaine.

The Peruvian-American anti-drug program in Peru was halted in February because of the growing threat from the drug traffickers and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas. Since then, Gen. Juan Zarate’s drug police have rebuilt the base and revamped their entire program. Instead of trying to cut down coca bushes, which enraged the growers and pushed them into the hands of the rebels, the police are attacking the traffickers themselves.

In the first five operating days, Zarate said, police destroyed seven jungle coca-processing laboratories and two airstrips. In all of 1988, the police had destroyed only 75 laboratories.

Zarate noted that the laboratories hit so far produced refined cocaine base, in a sophisticated process that is the penultimate step before the production of cocaine powder itself. Until recently, most labs in the valley, little more than plastic swimming pools and dangerous chemicals, produced only coca paste and shipped it to neighboring Colombia for refining into base and then the white powder--cocaine hydrochloride.

That change suggests a trend toward more processing within Peru, he said. In an operation last Friday, police arrested four Colombians and three Peruvians who ran one of the labs. They also have seized eight solar-powered radios used to communicate with the small planes from Colombia, generators, centrifuges, a chain saw and 160 kilograms of cocaine base.

Yet even as the police put their new campaign on show for a group of reporters, there were numerous signs of the overwhelming odds they face in a valley where more than half the coca used in illicit cocaine production grows.

Skimming northward from the old police base at Tingo Maria toward Santa Lucia at the 150-mile-long valley’s midpoint, the helicopters flew over seemingly endless tracts of coca fields spread across the wide valley floor and up the impossibly steep mountainsides.

Littered With Tree Trunks

Immense columns of smoke rose from the jungle’s floor and walls as “colonists” burned and cleared fields, both for legal crops and coca. Hillsides were littered with fallen and charred tree trunks, like wooden matches spilled from a box. Environmentalists have warned that the rapid clearing of this rain-forest jungle on the eastern edge of the Andes mountains, a main source of the Amazon River, poses as grave a danger as the pollution of the rivers from the tons of illegal chemicals used to make paste and base.

The plastic explosive used to blow up the airstrip is far more powerful than the dynamite used previously, so the damage was far greater, and the charge is set in a way that drives the force downward to create a huge crater. But peasant crews can still repair such damage in days, if not hours as before. Indeed, drug agents say there is a local cottage industry in informing police of illegal strips so that the traffickers will pay residents to fix them.

The strip itself was merely a widened portion of one of the many roads in the valley, easily recreated elsewhere. Some agents debate the wisdom of blowing up airstrips at all, saying the known strips should be left intact so that the traffic in and out may be monitored to gather intelligence. Destroying the strips encourages their multiplication, making them harder to track, one U.S. agent said recently.

Zarate estimated there are about 60 landing strips in the Alto Huallaga, the high end of the valley, about 10 of which are in use in a single period.

A visit in the helicopters to one cocaine laboratory suggested the dual dangers of traffickers and rebels that complicate law enforcement in the region and raise potential dangers for U.S. involvement.

The lab was located between the villages of La Morada and Ramal del Aspuzana, just to the south of Santa Lucia, which are “Red Zones” virtually controlled by the guerrillas. A rebel attack at Ramal last year killed several police officers. The police unit grew visibly nervous as the visit dragged on for an hour or so, and then shooed the group back aboard the helicopters for a hurried departure.

“It’s not a good idea to spend a lot of time here,” Zarate said.

He said his men discovered this lab because the wooden bunkhouse built a few months ago for the laborers had smacked of opulence inappropriate for the banana and cacao grower who owned it. The dormitory, built on stilts to raise it off the jungle floor, contained 18 beds, and the owner’s nearby house had a fancy new mattress, a child’s highchair and tricycle and an empty one-gallon bottle of 12-year-old Scotch whiskey on a dispenser on the front porch.

Although this is luxury by jungle standards, it bears no comparison to the gold-plated bathrooms and exotic zoos of the true cocaine barons in Colombia.

From the clearing where the houses stood, a winding path led several hundred yards through the jungle to the laboratory. Tall wild cane and bamboo plants formed a canopy overhead that hid the trail from the air, and the main path at one point led over a wooden footbridge and away from the lab in order to fool strangers.

Following a lesser trail, the visitors arrived at the shell of a wooden building on stilts, about 20-by-20 feet square, which had contained the fine cloth filters, centrifuges, drying heaters and chemicals for making coca base until it was blown up and burned Friday. The lab could produce 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of cocaine base a week. The building had been covered with green plastic, with discarded coca leaves and branches strewn over the top to hide it from the air, Zarate said.

Given such logistical problems, he said his forces were placing far greater emphasis on intelligence to locate traffickers’ hide-outs, which he conceded is made more difficult by the presence of the Sendero Luminoso guerrilla group.

Sendero Luminoso provides protection for the traffickers’ flights and laboratories in return for up to 15% of the value of a shipment, according to Peruvian analysts. The movement does not hesitate to kill informers, and agents suspect that the 20 or more bodies found floating down the river past the new base when it reopened were soplones (informers).

The base is 10 miles east of the town of Uchiza, a cocaine haven where the rebels attacked the police garrison earlier this year and killed 10 officers, three in a public execution in the town square.

The rebels also have capitalized on the presence of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in the valley to galvanize local opposition to the anti-drug program. Both the Peruvians and the Americans on the trip played down the U.S. assistance.

About two dozen DEA agents operate in Peru, accompanying police missions from the Santa Lucia base, which now houses 200 Peruvian drug police.

Zarate said the number of air shipments has fallen by about half since Colombia began its crackdown on cocaine traffickers Aug. 18 and seized scores of small planes. Zarate also said the cost for coca base produced in Peru has dropped to between $4,000 and $5,000 a kilogram, from as much as $8,000, because of falling demand from the drug lords who can’t move the goods as easily.

He also said that the Peruvian effort must be coordinated with a broader international program to have any impact, and that means greater aid for development. He pointed proudly to a donated British armored car patrolling the airstrip. A sign over one of the orange- and blue-painted barracks declared, “Here We Work for Peru and the World.”