Contraband Saves City in Peru From Poverty

People here say they can’t remember the last time they heard a bomb explode or saw a red flag with hammer and sickle dangling from a lamp post.

While the rest of Peru slides ever deeper into leftist guerrilla violence, this city in the southernmost corner of the country has remained an outpost of tranquility.

The reason? Contraband, residents say.

French perfumes, Japanese televisions and a flood of other luxury items smuggled across the Chilean border have invigorated the local economy and spared Tacna the poverty that has fostered violence elsewhere in Peru.

The place is so quiet that it is said that Shining Path guerrillas, after waging war on security forces in the Andes, sometimes come to this tidy city of tree-lined avenues for rest and relaxation.

They aren’t the only Peruvians who spend holidays here.

Bargain hunters flock to Tacna on daily flights from Lima to patronize its sprawling contraband markets, where stalls are stacked with imported goods, every price is negotiable and no one asks for a receipt.

American cigarettes, Chilean wines and Spanish champagne can be bought for a fraction of their legal price, all carried over the border from a duty-free zone in the Chilean city of Iquique.

“Subversion feeds on poverty, and we don’t suffer the poverty and unemployment that the rest of the country does--thanks in part to contraband,” said Oscar Martorell, a former president of the Tacna Chamber of Commerce.

He estimated that one third of Tacna’s 170,000 people or their families are professional smugglers or contraband merchants.

Technically, of course, it’s all illegal. But city fathers know that contraband means jobs and votes, Martorell said, and police seldom crack down on the trade.

“How often do the police come here? Never. Except to buy something, and then out of uniform,” said a young man selling tape decks, televisions and radios at Tacna’s Bolognesi market.

A heavy military presence, rooted in a lingering mistrust for Chile, has also warded off guerrilla violence, residents say.

In the War of the Pacific in the 1880s, Chilean forces captured Tacna but agreed in a peace pact to let the locals decide their fate in a plebiscite. To the Chileans’ surprise, Tacna voted to return to Peru and rejoined it in 1929.

Residents celebrated the 60th anniversary of “Reincorporation Day” last month by parading down city streets, carrying an enormous, red-and-white Peruvian flag and throwing rose petals on it.

The province’s years as a kind of South American Alsace-Lorraine have ironically made Tacna, now ringed by military bases, home to Peru’s most fervent nationalists.

“The truth is that we never stopped being Peruvian, despite the years annexed to Chile,” said Patricio Conti, a Tacna native and public relations manager at a local mining company.

The city’s population is now one of the fastest-growing in Peru, doubling in the past 12 years as migrants from the Andean highlands have poured in to seek a piece of the action in contraband.

Despite signs of growth pressure that might breed discontent, like shantytowns on the city’s fringes, Tacna seems remarkably free of agitation by the Maoist Shining Path rebels.

City officials walk the streets unarmed and without bodyguards, ignoring a recent wave of Shining Path killings of mayors elsewhere.

The local university shows none of the red flags, pro-guerrilla graffiti and giant portraits of Mao Tse-tung covering walls at other Peruvian universities.

Tacna’s biggest concern these days seems to be whether President Alan Garcia will formalize the city’s status as a contraband capital and declare it a duty-free zone.

Garcia, who has supported such a measure, this month declared Tacna a “special treatment zone” as a first step toward duty-free status, over the opposition of legal shop owners throughout Peru.

Legal or not, Tacna residents see no end to the import trade nor the profits, or peace, it has brought.

“Legalizing contraband now would be a bit like granting a birth certificate to someone who is 20 years old,” Martorell said. “It’s ingrained in the city’s way of life.”