[A-List] US imperialism: Peru

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Coca trade booming again in Peru

U.S.-sponsored plans to eradicate the plant spark protests by poor farmers

Scott Wilson  in San Francisco

The mountain slopes that rise around this town in Peru's high eastern jungle
were the site of a rare success story in the U.S. war on drugs. But the
resilient Andean drug industry is flowing back into the Apurimac River
Valley, testing a model partnership in Washington's increasingly aggressive
counter-drug campaign.Once one of the world's largest sources of coca leaf,
the valley was the focus of a U.S.-backed effort to intercept planes
shuttling the key raw material in cocaine to processing laboratories in
neighboring Colombia. Now U.S. eradication efforts in Colombia are squeezing
the trade back toward Peru, causing deep social unrest, the threat of armed
resistance to U.S. drug policy and political risks for a fragile Peruvian
government responsible for implementing the most controversial elements of
Washington's strategy.

U.S.-sponsored aerial herbicide spraying in Colombia reduced the number of
acres devoted to coca cultivation there last year by 15 percent, according
to CIA measurements, and by 30 percent, according to the United Nations. But
in Peru the acreage devoted to coca jumped 8 percent.

Coca prices here are rising with demand again as Colombian drug traffickers,
who moved the industry north in the late 1990s, return to create what U.S.
officials call "a strategic reserve" in Peru's lawless coca-producing
valleys, where a peasant resistance to new U.S. eradication efforts is
emerging.

"If we frame the debate as only eradication, eradication, eradication
instead of as a way to make lives better, we are setting ourselves up for a
conflictive relationship with the Peruvian government, and for the Peruvian
government with their own people," said a U.S. official. "But there is a
criminal element here separate from the peasants."

The Andean drug industry offers high risks and high rewards for the 20,000
coca growers who work the slopes along the Apurimac, muddy and swollen last
month with seasonal  rains. Not since the mid-1990s has the opportunity to
make money been greater for peasant coca farmers, who are among Peru's
poorest people, nor have those crops been more threatened by U.S.
eradication plans.

For the first time, the U.S. and Peruvian governments this year intend to
pull up coca crops by force in the Apurimac and Upper Huallaga river
valleys, unless peasants agree to eradicate their crops in return for
financial assistance. Until now, most forced eradication has been confined
to remote secondary producing regions safe from mass peasant mobilization.
The Apurimac and Upper Huallaga, by contrast, are the two primary sources of
Peruvian coca and historic redoubts of guerrilla insurgency.

Growing unrest in places like San Francisco, located about 230 miles
southeast of Lima, has put the Peruvian and U.S. governments at odds for the
first time over how best to combat rising coca cultivation, echoing debates
taking place in Colombia and Bolivia. The United States favors forced
eradication, conducted by trained Peruvian police units, while the
government wants to employ a mix of interdiction and financial incentives to
collapse the coca market.

Down from a peak of 396,000 acres in 1994, Peru now has at least 80,000
acres of coca, according to the most recent CIA measurements. The United
States intends to increase eradication this year, while trimming its
counter-narcotics aid package to Peru to $128 million, a 10 percent
reduction from 2002.

The issue poses a serious political challenge to President Alejandro Toledo,
who was elected in 2001 on a pledge to alleviate Peru's endemic poverty.
Hoping to avoid a direct confrontation with Peru's coca farmers at a time
when opinion polls show his approval ratings at 21 percent, Toledo  sent his
prime minister, Luis Solari, to Washington last month to meet with National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

U.S. officials said Solari appealed for a "new, refocused aid package" that
would forgo forced eradication in the Apurimac and Upper Huallaga in favor
of increased financial incentives for farmers to give up coca. So far such
programs have failed to take root here.

Peru's coca farmers in this riverside town and in the Upper Huallaga to the
north have staged demonstrations since last August against impending
eradication programs. The marches and blockades are the stirrings of a
grass-roots peasant movement in favor of legalized coca  production that
resembles one under way in neighboring Bolivia.

In February, Peruvian police arrested Nelson Palomino, the president of a
national network of coca growers formed in January. Palomino, who worked a
scruffy three-acre parcel of coca near this town of 30,000 people, was
imprisoned in Ayacucho on charges of inciting terrorism and kidnapping. He
has become a kind of martyr with national political ambitions in the 2006
presidential elections.

The communities along the Apurimac River were savaged in the mid-1980s
during Peru's war against the Maoist guerrilla movement known as the Shining
Path. Farmers protected themselves by organizing self-defense groups,
financing their guns  and ammunition with coca proceeds.
The self-defense groups still remain, along with groups of women who fought
alongside the men and now organize food and transportation for the
demonstrations.

Palomino's arrest came a month after he was named president of the National
Confederation of Agricultural Producers of Peru's Coca Basins. Organizers
say the new network comprises 500,000 small farmers, many of whom view coca
as part of Peru's "cultural patrimony" in light of its traditional uses as
tea, medicine and as a hunger suppressant.

U.S. officials say 95 percent of Peru's coca is destined for drugs, and
complain that Peruvians seldom connect coca and the brutal cocaine industry.

"My arrest was fundamentally political," said Palomino, 40, in a prison
interview conducted through his attorney. "The government thinks that by
imprisoning me it will cut off and paralyze the farmers."

Since his arrest, thousands of farmers from the Apurimac Valley have made
the 10-hour journey by dirt road to Ayacucho where they have occupied the
municipal sports complex. The protesters want Palomino released, and also
have a list of demands for new development programs in the region.

It is hard to locate any development, alternative or otherwise, along the
pockmarked highway that descends from Ayacucho's high plain into this
valley. Houses are made of thin tree trunks and topped with palm-thatched
roofs. Naked children bathe in roadside waterfalls. A cobblestone road, paid
for by U.S. alternative development money, is already washing away in
places. Coca leaves dry on large green tarps, next to cacao and coffee,
which sell for considerably less than coca.

"We were the pacifiers of this place and have the widows, orphans and
invalids to prove it," said Carlos Morales, a coca farmer in the town of
Llochegua who lost the lower half of his right leg in combat. "No one in the
Peruvian or U.S. governments remembers these sacrifices.

"The only thing feeding us and our children right now is coca," he
continued. "So what will happen if the government comes for our coca? Will
we sit with our arms crossed and watch? No. We will rise up."

The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0424, page 37