In return, Odicio, the elected leader of the Cacataibo people, would stop complaining to authorities about the drug traffickers destroying the rainforest to make way for coca fields, processing labs and airstrips.
The money would be transformative. Many of the estimated 4,000 Cacataibo, tucked out of the world’s view here in the lush Peruvian Amazon, live without electricity or running water. They get by largely on subsistence farming, hunting and fishing.
Still, Odicio turned it down.
“I couldn’t sleep after that, but I couldn’t betray my people,” he says. “I couldn’t have lived with myself. No good will come to us from narcotrafficking.”
For the 36-year-old leader of the Native Federation of Cacataibo Communities, rejecting the offer in September 2020 was the beginning of a nightmare that continues to this day. Graphic death threats by phone, text, social media and, worst of all, passed on by his neighbors, led him to take his family into hiding. He now returns to Yamino only occasionally and is poised to give up his leadership role among the Cacataibo.
His fears are well founded. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, an estimated 20 Indigenous leaders — four of them Cacataibo — have been killed in this frequently lawless territory, many by hit men believed to have been hired by narcotraffickers or associated loggers, as the cultivation of coca spreads from the Andean foothills to the Amazonian lowlands.
“If we continue like this, with the advance of narcotrafficking, this region will become a second VRAEM,” says Angel Gutiérrez, the interim governor of Ucayali, referring to Peru’s principal coca-growing zone. The VRAEM — the Valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers — produces as much of the leaf as Bolivia.
The reasons for the spread are complex. Ricardo Soberón, head of the national counternarcotics agency Devida, cites rising demand and the slowdown of trade through Peru’s Pacific ports during the pandemic. That made the migration of cultivation eastward, closer to the Colombian, Brazilian and Bolivian borders, a logical alternative.
Soberón believes another factor might be an increased police and military presence in the VRAEM. The hilly, forested terrain is also the hideout of the last remnants of the Shining Path, who focus more now on providing protection for the narcos than Maoist revolution. The group’s leader, Víctor Quispe Palomino, known as Comrade José, was wounded in clashes with security forces this month but remains at large in the valley.
Yet clamping down on cultivation in one part of the Peruvian Amazon, a frontier zone twice the size of California, often just causes it to surge in new areas in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Critics warn there can be no solution without addressing the fundamental economics — including demand in the world’s largest market for cocaine: the United States.
With three harvests a year, each typically yielding $700 to $1,400 per hectare before labor, pesticides and other costs, coca is far more profitable than other Amazonian crops, even with the risks associated with the illicit trade.
The encroachment of cultivation on Yamino and similar communities has piled further pressure on the region’s Indigenous groups, who were already…
Read More: Peru coca: For Indigenous leaders, a choice: Join narcos or run for your lives
