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New Challenge to U.S. Drug Policy in Andes
Ollanta Humala, with his wife Nadine Heredia, says that coca is grown largely for medicinal purposes. Eradication of the plant, which is also used to make cocaine, is a major part of U.S.-funded anti-drug efforts in the Andes.
(By Karel Navarro -- Associated Press)
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American officials in Peru and Bolivia insist that a more permissive attitude toward cultivation will mean more cocaine shipped to the United States. They contend that most of the coca grown in those countries is used for drugs, despite the denials of Morales, Humala and many of their supporters.
The United States has taken a wait-and-see approach with Morales, pledging to take his promises to fight illegal cultivation at face value. Since his inauguration in January, eradication has slowed considerably while drug control officials wait for him to more clearly define his policies.
Humala would likely get the same treatment, officials said.
"I would expect the response would be what it's been in Bolivia: If you have a democratically elected leader who has a policy he feels can combat narco-trafficking and says he wants to talk, we'll listen and try to work with him," a U.S. Embassy official in Lima said on condition of anonymity. "But I can't imagine that the U.S. government would pour resources into a program that it determined couldn't work."
Opponents of U.S. policy have long urged American officials to scrap forced eradications and put more money into domestic drug prevention programs. Joy Olson, director of the Washington Office on Latin America, said the theory behind eradication -- that reduced availability of the crop will drive up street prices and discourage cocaine use -- has been proved false by cocaine's continued widespread availability in American cities at low prices.
If cocaine prices are viewed in a 20-year context -- not the three-year curve the U.S. government routinely uses to point to price increases -- they are at near-record lows, about one-fifth of what they were in the early 1980s. Olson added that harmful side effects of eradication -- such as environmental and social damage caused by migrating cultivation zones -- have been evident throughout the Colombian countryside, where 60 percent of the coca fields detected in 2004 were newly planted, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
"Every time we have a tactical victory," said Olson, "someone new loses."
But the prospect of scaling back eradication in Peru and the rest of the region has some fearing a return to the 1980s, when Peru and Bolivia were the world's top producers of coca leaves. In the 1990s, Peru's farmers widely abandoned coca when prices for the crop fell and most production moved north to Colombia. Currently, Colombia produces about 90 percent of the cocaine and more than half of the heroin that ends up in the United States.
Ruben Vargas, a national security analyst and former counterterrorism and narco-trafficking official with Peru's Interior Ministry, said he believes the eradication efforts can help Peru, but only if its government throws its full support behind them and maintains the international funding that pays for 95 percent of its counternarcotics operation.
"If Humala wins the election, the international cooperation will probably be cut, and we'll move backward," Vargas said. "And that would leave Colombia more isolated. It's a big problem."
