NARCOTRAFFICKING IN THE AMAZON (I)Amazonia: Narco State
In recent years, the most remote region of the Peruvian Amazon has been taken over by the organization led by Jair Ardila Micchue, who enforces his will through fire and gunfire: chilling massacres, displaced Indigenous communities, open warfare between rival gangs, police corruption… A feudal state beyond the law where the presence of Peruvian authorities is merely symbolic, and the vast borders with Colombia and Brazil guarantee impunity.
Cocaine seizure in the Brazilian Amazon. The shipment had departed from the Triple Frontier of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, and was en route to Manaus.
Text by Carlos Suárez Álvarez. Photos, official sources.
Originally published in issue 158 of Cáñamo magazine, February 2011.
Tourists arrive at the Amazonian Triple Frontier of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru in search of the mysterious and lush jungle. They usually rent a boat to be dazzled by the magnificence of the Amazon and the alluring density of the riverbanks, while paying attention to the string of stereotypes that tourist guides use to satisfy their thirst for exoticism.
What no one tells them is that just a few hundred meters from where they try to bring their fantasies to life, vast coca plantations and coca leaf processing labs are thriving. They are not told that in 2010, the war for control over the production and trafficking of coca base and cocaine hydrochloride caused the deaths of dozens of people in the small towns of Leticia (Colombia) and Tabatinga (Brazil), and an undetermined number of victims—some estimate in the hundreds—in small indigenous communities and mestizo settlements along the Peruvian shore, many of which depend economically on the lucrative trade.
They hear nothing about Javier, the most powerful of all drug traffickers, nor about his superstitious obsession with consulting indigenous tobacco shamans (healers believed to possess the ability to foresee the future) to make decisions. Until 2008, the omens were favorable: Javier would be protected in delivering his largest shipments and confronting his most fearsome rivals. Encouraged by the forecast, in August of that year Javier ordered the assassination of his then boss, the Colombian Antonio Porras Dos Santos, alias Gallero. Two months later, followers of the late Gallero clashed with Javier in a shootout that left him seriously wounded and in the hands of the Peruvian police. Transferred to the city of Iquitos and put on trial, he appealed his imprisonment due to a procedural error and was released a few months later in a controversial decision. Upon returning to his domain, he ordered the killing of the fortune tellers who had been so optimistic: one was found impaled.
Antonio Porras, alias Gallero, murdered by his subordinate Jair Ardila Micchue.
police impotence
Rival gang clashes, revenge killings, and score-settling reached peak violence throughout 2010; Gallero’s betrayed men, now led by Alonso Mabesoy, sought to reclaim lost power. In the midst of this unrelenting war, vast jungle areas became no-go zones for police forces. A confidential report from the Peruvian police reveals their impotence: “On Saturday, when we were about to disembark at the Ramón Castilla hamlet, we were ambushed by narcotraffickers and Shining Path members. There were approximately ninety of them, and it is presumed they had M-16 submachine guns, grenade launchers, pistols, and night vision equipment. There were no casualties among the navy, and it’s presumed there were none among the terrorists either.”
Javier’s men and other groups roam freely. In the past two years, several police officers have been brutally murdered. The DIRANDRO (Peru’s anti-drug agency) team is small—just fifteen officers—and lacks resources. Javier is believed to command an army of 200 men and maintain alliances with various armed groups, including Shining Path and the FARC. So far, resistance has been futile. Peruvian authorities caught a brief respite when, in a joint operation with Colombian and Brazilian forces, they seized Javier’s headquarters in the hamlet of Hawai, on the Amazon River. But the drug lord soon returned. Today, everyone knows where he lives—but who will bell the cat?
Lack of personnel, lack of resources, and rampant police corruption: according to Peruvian intelligence sources, drug money has been used to generously bribe antinarcotics officers in the border town of Santa Rosa, where the DIRANDRO is based. Police, politicians, journalists—Javier’s influence spares no one. Since he can no longer move freely as before, it is said that mayors, governors, and council members dare not refuse (under threat of death) an invitation to his luxurious residence. In the Leticia municipal council, one member is now under death threat and receives police protection, which will end when his term does. On local radio and in the press: total silence.
The residence of Jair Ardela Micchue, alias Javier, in the Tri-Border Area.
gUERRILLaS Or PARAMILITARiES?
The people remain silent because they are afraid of dying. In Indigenous villages along the Peruvian bank of the Amazon—such as Gamboa, Dos de Mayo, and Mario Rivera—incursions by groups of thirty to fifty men are common. These groups travel in powerful motorboats, uniformed, defiant, and armed with long-range rifles: kidnappings, executions. Despite the bloody episodes, no one reports them. A police report interprets one of these incursions, which claimed five lives, as follows: “It cannot be ruled out that these were drug traffickers who hired heavily armed men, possibly FARC terrorists or Colombian paramilitaries, who may have links with Shining Path, responsible for security and safeguarding the merchandise and for intimidating the population to cause the abandonment of the villages and thus establish crops and rest areas.”
Indeed, the streets of villages like Gamboa, where several residents were murdered, are now only traversed by ghosts. Peruvian intelligence considers that the FARC maintains a strategic alliance with Javier, who is said to coordinate arms trafficking for the 63rd Front of that organization. Sometimes, armed groups leave leaflets during their raids identifying themselves as members of the Colombian guerrilla. However, Colonel Gilberto Pinilla, head of the National Police of Colombia in the department of Amazonas, denies this claim: “What is known so far is that they are Colombian criminals linked to drug trafficking who pretend to belong to these terrorist groups to subdue citizens through the fear of being considered FARC members.”
The repression Colombian authorities have exerted in recent years against drug trafficking within their territory has led to a shift in productive activity, especially toward Peru and Bolivia. In Colombia, cultivation and production are believed to be declining significantly; the most recent figures from the International Narcotics Control Board indicate that in 2008, there was an 18% decrease in cultivated areas, largely due to manual eradication efforts. But this pressure leads to what Peruvian economist Hugo Cabieses calls the “displacement effect”: crops begin to appear in other parts of the same country or, as in this case, in another country, especially in border zones far from the logistical centers of military and police apparatuses. As a result, in Peru, the cultivated area continues to grow at the same pace it declines in Colombia—and between 1999 and 2008, it increased by 45%.
Amazonian borders provide a guarantee of impunity that drug traffickers know how to exploit: although the police and military forces of the three countries attempt to coordinate their actions (and occasionally carry out joint operations), the reality is that when the Colombian police pursue a suspected trafficker along the river, he only has to cross to the Peruvian side for the chase to end—and vice versa. The borders span thousands of kilometers, crisscrossed by hundreds of small paths and rivers known only to locals, making them impossible to control—just like the airspace and the many airstrips hidden deep in the jungle. Furthermore, due to their remoteness and peripheral location, the means to fight one of the world’s main centers of production and trafficking are relatively scarce. According to Gustavo Pivoto, a delegate of Brazil’s Federal Police in Tabatinga, this vastness becomes an “extreme difficulty.” Taking the most conservative production estimates (two hundred tons), seizures are negligible: in 2009, just over six hundred kilos; in 2010, one ton.
Authorities in the tri-border area believe that the cocaine seizures (one ton in 2010) do not even account for 1% of total production.
by river, to the world
Habitually, in Peruvian laboratories, the cocaine base is produced, which is then transformed into cocaine hydrochloride (that is, cocaine) in laboratories of large cities like Manaus or Belém. It is a productive and commercial chain involving citizens of the three countries. “From the border, the cocaine goes to Fortaleza,” assures Pivoto, “and from there to Europe, but on the way there are two major stops: Manaus and Belém. Not to mention that on the route to Manaus, they also leave some in small towns for the local market.”
Shipments heading to Manaus vary in size; alongside spectacular shipments, small couriers proliferate. “It is quite common to find ‘mules’ who carry up to Manaus by river, earning a thousand reais per kilo (400 euros). It’s very little, but it’s easy money, sweet money. There are people who want to create their own organization: they buy their kilo at a thousand dollars for the base paste or two thousand dollars for the hydrochloride, and in Manaus, they’ll get paid five times more. And with that, they start to capitalize and structure themselves.” The Federal Police delegate considers drug trafficking one of the few sources of income in the region. “It’s easy money in a city that offers no job opportunities, where the vast majority of the population works in the countryside… You arrive with easy money for someone who has a family, children, who is going hungry…”
In this difficulty of legally obtaining money lies much of the success of the business among the region’s inhabitants. Thousands of families depend directly on cocaine production and trafficking: farmers, collectors, lab workers, chemical suppliers, stockpilers, mules, couriers… Perhaps because of this dependence, something more than just strengthening anti-narcotics efforts on the border will be necessary, as announced by the Peruvian interior minister and proudly echoed by officials from the other two countries. And if they succeed in their repressive efforts on the border, to what valley, mountain, or river will the criminals have to move to restart once again their business, as bloody as it is profitable?
