Peru Grapples With Growing Drug Trade

The two suspects pulled up on a black motorcycle outside a bar known as El Bunker along Avenida Roosevelt, on the seedy side of this capital’s generally gloomy downtown.

It was the judge’s favorite watering hole, a place to kick back after a draining day supervising drug cases at the Palace of Justice, two blocks away. He had sent his bodyguard home, apparently feeling secure in familiar environs.

The motorcycle riders were sicarios, hit men for hire, essential and abundant foot soldiers in the Latin American drug wars.

One of them approached the booth where the judge was seated with a lawyer. A silencer muffled the 7.65-millimeter pistol. Four bullets found the judge, killing him where he sat; another caught his colleague.

The assassination last month of Judge Hernan Saturno Vergara stunned this nation and highlighted in chilling fashion the power and reach of the globalized drug mafias that direct a multibillion-dollar shadow economy in Peru, the world’s second-leading producer of cocaine, after neighboring Colombia.

Authorities say the judge’s slaying points to the work of Mexican traffickers from the so-called Tijuana cartel, who oversee the shipment of U.S.-bound cocaine via Mexico. Saturno was part of a three-judge panel overseeing a major case against the cartel that was expected to yield a verdict soon.

Also last month, U.S. authorities intercepted a Peruvian tuna boat on the high seas with a reported 5 tons of cocaine.

“I fear we could be headed toward a narco-state, down the road of Colombia or Mexico,” Sonia Medina, Peru’s top narcotics prosecutor, said in an interview. “This is asphyxiating us.”

Some authorities suspect laundered drug money may figure prominently in the boom in casinos, slot-machine parlors, pharmacies and hotels that has altered the capital’s look. One government study found about $400 million in narcotics money had entered circulation here since 2003.

Like rampant money laundering, assassinations of judges, journalists and others who take on the drug mafias have been hallmarks of the Latin American cartels. Peru had mostly been spared such high-profile violence, and many officials here regarded the long-established drug trade as out of sight, out of mind.

But now many wonder if the culture of violence and corruption associated with the trade threatens to corrode the system.

“This killing seems to indicate a new escalation,” said Miguel Ramirez, a journalist for the Lima daily El Comercio whose reporting helped unmask Fernando Zevallos, a former Peruvian airline executive who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in December as a U.S.-named drug kingpin. “The murder of the judge has all the signs of a professional assassination.”

Peru’s new president, Alan Garcia, was sworn in to office nine days after the judge’s assassination and acknowledged the gravity of the situation.

“Today kidnappings and narco-trafficking are growing,” Garcia warned in his inaugural address. “The international cartels have arrived in our homeland. We must be firm with them.”

The president offered no new initiatives, beyond increased extradition of suspects to the United States and Europe, which together consume most of the world’s cocaine.

Critics say Peruvian authorities need to invest more money and force in the drug battle if substantial headway is to be made. The majority of the country’s estimated $150 million annual anti-drug budget comes from foreign sources, mostly the United States.

Still, Garcia’s comments were noteworthy in a nation where political leaders seldom allude to the cocaine trade. The issue was practically invisible during the recent national election.

“To me, this is the second most crucial issue pressing our country after poverty,” Medina said. “But it is not spoken of with such urgency.”

Mexican and Colombian gangsters run the drug markets here, forming alliances of convenience with Maoist rebels who hold sway in the subtropical valleys where the coca leaf, the raw ingredient in cocaine, is cultivated.

In December, remnants of the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, guerrilla group attacked an anti-narcotics patrol in the coca-rich Huallaga Valley, killing eight policemen, including several graduates of U.S.-funded training academies.

Surveys have shown that coca cultivation declined markedly here beginning in the mid-1990s, when Peru was the world’s leading producer. Authorities credit successful eradication and crop substitution projects, aided by sharp declines in prices for Peruvian leaf.

However, increased demand in recent years has led many farmers to reactivate abandoned coca fields, the United Nations reported this year, citing an upward trend.

An intense law enforcement presence in Colombia may help explain a possible resurgence in Peruvian coca leaf, authorities say. And although acreage is down from a decade ago, coca farmers are moving into new areas and appear to be getting more yield per acre.

“Common sense leads one to believe that as pressure builds in one place, the producer is likely to go someplace else where the opportunity is less hazardous,” said one Western official here who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“The coca is more intensely cultivated, and the number of plants per hectare [about 2.5 acres] is increasing. They’re applying sophisticated agronomic techniques to a very profitable cash crop.”

The drug cartels oversee the production of the leaf into cocaine and its transport out of the country, mostly in container ships, often concealed amid seafood and other legitimate exports. (One major shipment was discovered amid a consignment of frozen squid; another was labeled “canned tuna.”) Mexican traffickers now manage much of the business, authorities say.

The judge’s assassination was a major setback in the 4-year-old case against more than two dozen alleged members of the Tijuana cartel. The suspects were arrested after 1.7 tons of cocaine destined for Mexico and U.S. markets were discovered in the northern Peruvian port city of Chimbote, a little-policed frequent embarkation point for drug shipments.

Saturno’s killing has forced authorities to reschedule and repeat months of testimony before a February deadline that could see suspects go free under Peruvian law.

Even as the judge’s killing shined a spotlight on the Tijuana gang, one of its alleged ringleaders here professed he had nothing to do with it.

“I didn’t send anyone to kill Judge Hernan Saturno,” Miguel Angel Morales, alleged capo of the Tijuana cartel whose case was among those being considered by the judge, said in a jailhouse interview with the Lima daily La Republica. “His death hasn’t benefited me in the least. To the contrary, it has made me look bad.”

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McDonnell was recently on assignment in Lima. Andres D’Alessandro in The Times’ Buenos Aires Bureau and special correspondent Adrian Leon in Lima contributed to this report.