U.S.-Sponsored Eradication Plans Spark Peasant Protests

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

SAN FRANCISCO, Peru -- 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, now muddy and swollen 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 this 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 underway in
neighboring Bolivia.

Last month, 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, 50 miles southwest of here, 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.

Like many of his neighbors, Palomino has a certificate signed by the region's commanding military officer declaring that he participated in what peasants call "the
pacification," which political analysts say was the most important counter-insurgency development after the 1992 arrest of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman.

Palomino's brother, Zosimo, disappeared during the war. His uncle was killed.

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. "We are very well organized. 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."

                                               © 2003