Pubdate: Thu, 01 Feb 2001
Source: Le Monde Diplomatique (France)
Copyright: 2001 Le Monde diplomatique
Contact:  21 bis, rue Claude-Bernard, 75005 Paris , France
Fax: +33 1 42 17 21 00
Website: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/
Author: Maurice Lemoine,  special correspondent
Translator: Julie Stoker

PERU PAYS

South America's Hostages And Victims

In its October 1998 annual report the United Nations International Drug 
Control Programme (UNDCP) welcomed the successes achieved in Bolivia and 
Peru. Peru's policy is to shoot down suspect aircraft and sever the air 
link to stop the transfer of coca and basic coca paste (the first stage in 
processing it into cocaine) to Colombia. It has certainly had an effect. 
And so has the involvement of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. But 
they do not tell the whole tale. Far from it.

In the early 1990s Peruvian peasants were growing more than 150,000 
hectares of coca. Peru's narco-traffickers were not organised groups, with 
their own structures for direct export to Europe or the United States. They 
simply provided the raw material to the Cali cartel (Colombia) for 
processing and marketing. In 1994-95 that Colombian mafia decided to 
negotiate its surrender as a result of governmental and international 
pressure. On 6 August 1995,the arrest of Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the 
cartel's number two, meant that Cali was finished. According to Ricardo 
Vargas, of Accion Andina, a regional group looking for peaceful 
alternatives to narco-trafficking and its repression, "Cali bought up 60% 
of Peruvian production. Prices collapsed in Peru. Then and only then did 
production tail off."

At that time the structure of narco-trafficking was being "democratised". 
In Colombia, the Medellin and Cali cartels were being replaced by a number 
of less clearly-defined groups that were harder to identify and control. 
They were more often equipped with satellite phones and laptops than guns 
or rifles. For logistical reasons, it was they who repatriated Peruvian 
coca production to Colombia. That explains the dramatic decline in crops in 
Peru (only 50,000 hectares in 2000) and the equally dramatic increase in 
Colombia. In other words, under Alberto Fujimori, it was not repression of 
the peasants or alternative production programmes that led to a decrease in 
the land area cultivated, but the break-up of a large mafia-style 
organisation at the highest level, and the change in strategy of its 
successors.
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MAP posted-by: Beth