Case Study : Coca Growers Prove Tenacious and Elusive : In Peru, there is progress but no victory in sight against cocaine, a prime livelihood for many.

Lolo Soto, governor of Uchiza district in eastern Peru, says he planted more than an acre of coca on his farm last year only to see the seedlings wither away in November.

Others here will tell you how coca bushes are drying up and dying all around the district, how drug-smuggling planes now shy away from the Uchiza airstrip, how once-abundant narco-dollars have become scarce. They are worried about their community’s livelihood.

“It is destroyed,” says Soto, 40, an appointed official who belongs to Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s Change 90 Party.

Uchiza is notorious as the drug-smuggling hub of the Upper Huallaga Valley, once the world’s most productive source of raw cocaine. Clearly, something significant is happening when this city’s coca boom goes bust.

But despite the residents’ complaints, no one is claiming that the decline of Uchiza’s bonanza signals victory in the long campaign to cut off the drug at its Peruvian source. In fact, there is no victory in sight.

And it’s easy to see why by flying along the eastern slope of the Peruvian Andes, where endless green foothills cover a dozen degrees of latitude, and a vast web of subtropical valleys descends gradually into the Amazon River Basin. In this area, bigger than Iowa or maybe Idaho, coca will grow just about anywhere it’s planted.

Coca has been a staple here for centuries. Andean Indians chew coca leaves, and it was a legal crop until the mid-1980s. Even now, residents make few apologies for continuing to grow coca, which is central to their livelihood. Drug enforcement officers talk about getting them to switch to legal crops, but economically, the alternatives appear a poor substitute.

So, coca growing continues despite international efforts to stop it. So far, Peruvians have planted it in a relatively modest amount of the potential growing area, and it has done very well: Its leaves have yielded most of the world’s cocaine for more than a decade. That’s a lot of coke, but a mere sample of what this lush, cocaine kingdom could produce.

Gov. Soto says he knows from personal experience why production is down at Uchiza.

His account: He was out at his farm one day in November when a big American Huey helicopter landed and 10 or 15 men got out. Some were uniformed Peruvian police, some members of a Peruvian coca-eradication agency, and two were agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The Peruvian visitors, all carrying spray guns, quickly doused his young coca bushes while the DEA agents looked on. Several days later, the coca was dead.

The invasion of the governor’s coca patch may be a tall tale from Peru’s wild frontier, but true or false, it is the kind of story that nearly everyone in Uchiza tells these days. In most versions, American helicopters spray from the air, releasing clouds of yellowish or reddish mist that settle over doomed coca fields.

The spray is said to be a soil fungus that attacks the roots of coca bushes. The helicopters presumably come from Santa Lucia, an anti-drug base built with U.S. aid and staffed by Peruvian police and American DEA agents.

The fungus, American helicopters and Santa Lucia all exist in fact. But U.S. officials steadfastly deny spraying fungus or any herbicide.

The Americans say the fungus that kills coca in the Upper Huallaga is natural to the area and probably has spread as strains of it have developed resistance to fungicides. Soil depletion, from intensive coca cultivation, and aging plants may add to the severity of the plague.

For Gov. Soto, the problem may be temporary. He already has planted a new acre of coca.

Farmers whose coca fields die from fungus can find plentiful new land elsewhere. Generally, newer coca areas are more remote, harder for anti-drug authorities to find and reach.

“The cocaleros have left Uchiza and have gone down where they can operate more easily with better land,” the American official says. “Uchiza is no longer the most active center of cocaine trade in Peru.”

Last month, the Peruvian air force took control of the Uchiza airstrip in an added effort to stop cocaine traffic here. Even before the air force came, drug flights at the dirt strip had declined. Peruvian police and DEA agents from Santa Lucia have been carrying out operations against traffickers for the past two years.

And between November and the end of April, two temporary radar installations in northeastern Peru were used to spot drug planes for Peruvian air force interceptors to chase. To evade the increased enforcement, many traffickers began using more remote landing strips.

The lieutenant colonel in charge of the air force contingent at Uchiza points out an abandoned two-story hotel close by the runway. It is a moldy reminder of the bygone boom days, when the airstrip belonged to the narco-traffickers.

“All the narcos stayed here, taking out drugs, bringing them in,” says the officer, who goes by the nom de guerre Centauro.

Still, it is obvious that coca has not completely disappeared from Uchiza. Near the end of the airstrip stands a neat patch of shoulder-high bushes with small, pointed leaves. The coca belongs to one of the houses that flank the runway.

“Who’s the owner of that coca there?” Centauro asks a preteen girl playing in front of the house.

“He’s in Lima,” says the girl.

“Who harvests the coca?” Centauro insists. The girl hesitates.

“We harvest it,” she finally admits.

The 80 airmen now based at Uchiza don’t have secure sleeping quarters at the airstrip yet. Centauro thinks they may move into the abandoned hotel if he can get some money to fix and fortify it, but for now they spend their nights at an army barracks on the other side of town, leaving the airstrip unguarded.

They aren’t about to camp at the airstrip. The surrounding foothills are alive with guerrillas, zealous Maoists of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. In 1989, the guerrillas attacked Uchiza, burning the city hall and killing eight policemen.

Centauro and other officials accuse Sendero Luminoso of protecting traffickers in exchange for a cut of the drug money. Just a few miles from Uchiza, in a village called Paraiso, drug planes land and take off freely on a wide stretch of dirt highway, reportedly under guerrilla protection.

Although Paraiso is part of the municipality and district of Uchiza, local officials claim no authority there. “That is not the domain of the municipality; that is the domain of Sendero,” says Demetrio Diaz, the mayor of Uchiza. “No one goes in there.”

“Paraiso is not my responsibility,” adds Centauro.

In Uchiza, Centauro says, “the greater part of the population is colluding with the narco-traffickers.” He doesn’t mention Mayor Diaz in that regard, but others have.

Army officers arrested Diaz in April and took him to anti-drug investigators in Lima. “They abducted me,” the mayor says. “They had me under investigation for 15 days in Lima. Then they brought me back here and freed me, because they had not found any link with the many narco-traffickers who have fallen.”

A U.S. official in Lima has a different version. Diaz “was in fact receiving a cut out of money from each flight that went out, and a certain amount of money for other operations,” the American says. Asked why Diaz was not charged, the American says something about corruption in high places.

Diaz, 36, is said to have accumulated great wealth in Uchiza, but the mayor says his television and FM radio stations are very small operations. His discotheque, called Porky’s, is rented out. And his 110-acre family farm has little more than an acre of coca, he says.

Coca growers and cocaine traffickers have invested little in Uchiza, according to Diaz. The city has 20,000 residents, and more than 200 bars, but most of the real estate looks run-down and most of the streets are unpaved.

“Everyone takes their capital out,” he says. “Why? Because they think that when the police land here someday, they will seize their things. Why? Because coca is illegal.”

The best building in town is the city hall, a new structure of concrete and smoked glass where Diaz has his offices. Diaz’s desk is flanked by a white municipal flag, protected from dust by a sheet of clear plastic. The mayor proudly explains the symbols on the flag, which he designed himself.

There is a radiant sun, a dove. “Here on this side we present our monoculture, coca,” he says, then points to the other side. “And here are the alternative products that should replace it: oil palm, cacao, cattle.”

But a lot of foreign aid and investment is needed to help coca farmers replace coca, he says: a better highway to Lima for getting products to market, agro-industry to process harvests, a 10-megawatt hydroelectric dam “to be able to industrialize the whole Upper Huallaga Valley.”

Fresh money, that’s what Diaz wants. “We want investments, and we as a town will give all the support needed for investors to come here,” he says. “Why? Because we think it is time that we came out of clandestineness. We can’t live outside the law.”

Down the street from the city hall is the headquarters of the Front for Defense Against Eradication of Upper Huallaga. Alberto Lopez, the Front’s coordinator, explains that the organization was founded by coca farmers in 1988, when police operations in the valley were eradicating coca fields, pulling up bushes by the roots.

The U.S.-promoted operations started farther up the valley at Tingo Maria, previously the Peruvian capital of cocaine. As eradication proceeded there, more and more cocaleros began planting in the Uchiza area. The eradication stopped after protests made it a political issue too hot for the government to handle.

Now the Front is protesting alleged fungus spraying by the DEA. “Our only sustenance for our families is the coca leaf, and these plants have been sprayed by the DEA,” Lopez says.

On several occasions, when DEA agents have come to Uchiza with Peruvian police on anti-drug operations, local residents have thrown rocks at them. Some of the operations have been to search for small drug labs in private homes.

“There were dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of little back-yard family labs,” says a U.S. official in Lima. “That’s what made it impossible to have a lasting effect on trafficking, because you would have to go in and wipe out whole neighborhoods.”

Lopez says 70% of the coca plantations in the Uchiza area have been destroyed by fungus. And what’s left to harvest is hard to sell because of official interdiction of trafficking in the area, he complains. “The coca is piling up in our houses because we don’t have a market.”

Walter Tocas, who was Lopez’s predecessor as coordinator of the cocaleros’ front, was killed July 6 last year. Lopez says murderers hired by “the economic power”--code for traffickers--assassinated Tocas because he had signed an agreement accepting a U.S.-Peruvian pact for reducing coca production.

Coca is spreading north into less developed places in the Middle Huallaga Valley. The traffickers naturally follow.

At Campanilla, about 60 miles north of Uchiza, the local airstrip is controlled by a major trafficker named Limoniel Chavez, also known as “Vaticano,” American officials say. They say Vaticano is believed to have a “small army” of armed guards.

His paved airstrip was part of the dirt highway that runs along the Huallaga Valley. Now vehicles detour around that stretch of road to leave it free for air traffic, the Americans say.

Farther south on the highway, out of operating range of drug enforcement helicopters based at Santa Lucia, the cocaine business is also beginning to thrive.

The highway ends at Yurimaguas. The airport there is still not under air force control, but a colonel from Lima says it will be soon.

A Catholic priest in Yurimaguas says he sees no reason for the air force to control the airport because cocaine trafficking in the area is done from outlying airstrips. At Pampa Hermosa, 25 miles away, drug traffickers pay guerrillas, army officers and police for landing rights, he says.

The priest says that before Fujimori, with the support of the military, suspended democratic government last April, three or four planes a day passed by on their way to Pampa Hermosa before dawn. “There are fewer now,” he says, maybe because they have changed routes.

Sitting in a wooden armchair on his veranda, looking out over the muddy Huallaga River, the priest predicts that as long as there is coca, the planes will keep coming. “They are planting more all the time,” he says.

And they are planting more in other valleys: the Ene, the Aguaytia, the Ucayali, the Tambo, the Apurimac, the Madre de Dios. American officials estimate that the whole Huallaga Valley now accounts for little more than half of the 300,000 acres of coca planted in Peru.

For Uchiza, this may be the end of an era, but for many other places it is only the beginning.

The Latin ‘Pharmacy’

Reliable data on cocaine, marijuana and heroin use in North America is hard to get because all three drugs are illegal. But it is clear that Latin America is a major contributor to the drug problem.

Latin America is believed to be the source of virtually all cocaine consumed by an estimated 6 million to 7 million regular users in the United States.

It is the top foreign source for marijuana, accounting for 60% to 70% of the supply; domestic production and Southeast Asia account for the rest. Estimates of marijuana use in North America vary widely, from less than 1 million to 20 million.

Asia remains the main source for heroin sold in the United States. But the picture is changing, and current data is scarce. Mexico may produce up to a third of the heroin used in the U.S., and Colombia recently entered the market. Most reports say there are 500,000 to 750,000 North American addicts, but use is spreading.

* Country by country

Argentina: Transshipment point for cocaine.

Belize: Grows marijuana. Transshipment point for cocaine.

Bolivia: World’s second-largest producer of coca base. Transshipment point for cocaine.

Brazil: Major transshipment point for cocaine bound for Europe. Cocaine flights cross it. Grows marijuana.

Chile: Transshipment point for cocaine.

Colombia: World’s top refiner and shipper of cocaine, supplying about 80% of final product. Also grows coca, marijuana and opium poppies.

Dominican Republic: Transshipment point for cocaine.

Ecuador: Grows coca leaves. Cocaine flights cross it.

Guatemala: Transshipment point for cocaine. Grows opium poppies.

Jamaica: Transshipment point for cocaine. Grows marijuana.

Mexico: Main transshipment point for cocaine. Grows marijuana and opium poppies.

Panama: Major transshipment point for cocaine.

Peru: World’s largest producer of coca base, more than 60%.

Sources: U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy; “The Business of Drugs” by Mary H. Cooper; Times Staff and Wire Reports