PERU:Booming demand and the ingenuity of new gangs have given impetus to Peru's drugs trade, writes Patrick McDonnellin Santa Lucia.
RUSTIC MULE trains ferry vital chemicals to clandestine jungle labs. Booby-trapped fields ward off intruders.
Trekkers never seen on the Discovery Channel backpack the prized finished product on epic journeys from steamy Amazon hideaways to chilly highland distribution depots.
And a shadowy remnant of the Shining Path rebel army, led by a charismatic man named Artemio, uses its muscle to pocket a fortune in a sinister protection racket.
Peru's cocaine industry, the world's largest and most violent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is on the upswing again. Plots of coca bushes, whose leaves yield cocaine, have increased by about one-third since 1999, to about 127,000 acres, according to Peruvian and United Nations estimates.
And this time, the traffickers might be more difficult to combat because the kingpins from Colombia have been replaced by a piecemeal network, a sort of gold rush of international entrepreneurs.
Production is still well below the record highs of the early 1990s, and neighbouring Colombia has surpassed Peru as the global cocaine leader, supplying 90 per cent of the US market, according to the US state department. Moreover, president Alan Garcia is a staunch foe of the drug.
"Peru will not resign itself to be a country of narco-trafficking," said the pro-US Garcia, who took office in 2006.
But Peru, the world's number two supplier, feeds a booming demand in Brazil, Europe, east Asia and as far away as Australia, authorities say. The density of coca plantings has doubled in some cases, experts say, and the fertiliser-nourished leaf yields a greater proportion of cocaine alkaloid, the active ingredient in cocaine.
A wave of drug-related lawlessness - assassinations, ambushes, threats against prosecutors - has fanned fears of the kind of narco-instability that afflicts Colombia and Mexico. The Tijuana cartel is suspected of the 2006 slaying in Lima, the Peruvian capital, of a judge hearing a case against an alleged cartel leader.
And renewed militancy among the peasants who grow the coca leaf has sparked road closures and violent clashes with law enforcement officers.
The Garcia administration initially agreed to suspend eradication efforts, a mainstay of the US-backed anti-drug policy. But Garcia later reversed course and even suggested that clandestine laboratories be raided and bombed. With US aid that totals about $50 million (€32 million) a year, Peru has trained and deployed hundreds of anti-drug police officers.
"If we don't kill the danger now," Garcia declared, Peru could be confronted with "an insurgency as large as occurred in our neighbouring country" - a reference to Colombia, where cocaine underwrites guerrilla armies.
Former interior minister Fernando Rospigliosi has warned of the corrosive effect of a burgeoning drug trade. "Its tentacles always reach to the halls of the highest authority," he said.
During the 1990s, US-backed enforcement efforts chased much of the coca trade to Colombia. Now, some people say, the wheel is turning: pressure in Colombia is shifting production to Peru.
But today's tableau is distinct from the scenario of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Gone are the Colombian drug barons swaggering around in opulent jungle redoubts such as the nearby town of Uchiza, once dubbed the world cocaine capital, with its discos and bordellos. Replacing the Colombians is a multinational network that reaches from the Amazon basin to a globalised market.
"We're up against an army of ants," said Gen Miguel Hidalgo, who heads Peru's national anti-drug police.
Authorities here have identified smuggling rings from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, among other countries. A Peruvian gang allegedly headed by a petite woman known as Floricienta (after the lead character in an Argentine soap opera of the same name) is said to control a massive chemical-supply network.
Today, Peruvian traffickers produce pure cocaine for export, not the paste that once was regularly shipped to Colombia for final processing.
US-supported police efforts have shut down clandestine landing strips and pinched road access to the planting districts on the lush eastern flanks of the Andes. But ever-adaptable traffickers have expanded cultivation zones while employing pack animals and mochileros - backpackers - to maintain the illicit flow.
Negotiating extreme terrain, low-tech legions use mules to haul in the essential chemical precursors, and cocaine-laden backpackers stealthily travel age-old Inca trails beneath the canopy, creating invisible contraband thoroughfares.
"Everything is now done on a small scale, a lot of little pieces," said Col Whitman Rios, head of special operations at the US-supported anti-drug base in the Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru's most notorious production zone.
This is an area of hypnotic natural beauty, where the Huallaga River meanders through luxuriant hills and sumptuous flatlands like a chocolate-coloured pretzel in a sea of green. From the air, there is no hint of the battles raging amid the verdant expanses.
On the ground, government forces deploy against targets gleaned from satellite imagery and informants. Then, Vietnam-era US helicopters ferry in "eradicators" armed with metal tools designed to yank coca plants from their roots. Unlike Colombia, Peru bans chemical spraying: it is all done by hand.
Coca growers, known as cocaleros, have devised a crafty countermeasure: some plants are rigged with homemade bombs; rat traps serve as triggering devices.
"I reached for the bush and it exploded in my face," said José Angel Solano Gomez (40), an eradicator who lost his left eye and suffered other injuries in an encounter with a pipe bomb attached to a coca plant.
In the past two years, 73 eradication workers have been wounded and two killed, the government says. More than two dozen police officers have died in drug-related violence.
Flanked by armed escorts, eradicators set out in the stifling heat, like an odd amalgam of ancient and futurist warriors: they don helmets, eye-protection gear and bullet-proof vests and, when needed, carry 10ft lances that provide some distance from booby-trapped shrubs.
Paramedics tote antivenin for snakebites and medication for blast and gunshot wounds. Teams of US-trained bomb dogs sniff the fields.
"The campesinos say we're taking away their livelihoods," said Hugo Gozar (50), a veteran eradicator, referring to the farmworkers.
Throughout the Andean Amazon basin, the imperative of the marketplace pushes peasants to the dependable coca plant. About 65,000 Peruvian families make a living off the coca leaf and trafficking, according to a US state department report.
Alternative crops such as oil palm and cacao have met with some success, US officials say. But many impoverished farmers insist that no legal product can replace the myth-shrouded bush and its profitable harvests.
"Here, there is no alternative to coca," said Juan Leon Echegaray, a father of six and a cocalero near Tingo Maria. "They come and they offer us a few chickens and some cacao. How am I to survive on that?"