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Peru Narcotics Trafficking
As the world's largest producer of coca and cocaine
paste,
Peru had a major drug-trafficking problem during the
1980s,
concentrated in and around the Upper Huallaga Valley,
where most
of the coca used in the manufacture of cocaine for export
was
grown. Weekly flights from the area's more than 100
clandestine
airstrips by small aircraft laden with cocaine paste were
believed to have peaked in 1988 and 1989 at about fifty.
Concentrated efforts in late 1989 and 1990 to restrict the
trafficking in Colombia, the destination of most flights,
and in
Peru itself were partially successful, as indicated by a
sharp
overall decline in price for the coca leaf. Counting
Peruvian
coca growers (estimated to number between 70,000 and
320,000),
cocaine-paste processors (estimated at between 23,000 and
107,000), and cocaine-paste transporters (some 2,400 to
11,000),
from 95,400 and 438,000 individuals were employed in the
illicit
production and preliminary refining of the drug in Peru.
Considering the average peasant family size of five,
between
477,000 and 2.64 million Peruvians depended directly on
coca and
cocaine-paste production for their livelihoods, or between
about
4 percent and 20 percent of the country's economically
active
population (about 10 percent of Peru's coca production is
legal,
mostly for traditional uses of coca by the indigenous
population). Joint Peruvian-United States efforts to
reduce the
supply of cocaine reaching North America initially focused
on
coca crop eradication but shifted to interdiction and crop
substitution in the late 1980s, in part owing to tensions
with
peasant growers.
Cocaine and cocaine base use among Peruvians was also
perceived as a problem. A 1990 national epidemiology study
of
drug use among 12- to 50-year-olds put one-time use of
cocaine
paste at 4.6 percent and more frequent cocaine use at 1.5
percent, slightly higher than a similar study conducted in
1986.
It was believed that drug use in and around centers of
drug
production was growing much more rapidly. Arrests for drug
consumption were about 1,900 in 1985, peaked at 2,200 in
1986,
and then declined to about 1,400 in 1987, 900 in 1988, and
500 in
1989. Cocaine seized by Peruvian authorities showed a
similar
pattern--15.4 tons in 1985, 48.4 in 1986, 36.6 in 1987,
30.9 in
1988, and 8.4 in 1989, with a substantial increase to 14.9
tons
during the first half of 1990. Peruvian authorities
recognized
the seriousness of the drug production and trafficking
problem
but were more worried about the economic crisis and the
insurgency.
Data as of September 1992
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