Environmental monitors from Yaamino, Peru, walk through a coca field outside their village. (Angela Ponce/For The Washington Post) Comment on this story Comment YAMINO, Peru — For Herlin Odicio, the stranger’s offer was life-changing. The man, who had turned up unannounced in this remote Indigenous village speaking Spanish with a Colombian accent and calling himself “Fernando”, offered to pay Odicio $127,000 for every planeload of cocaine paste that took off from his community’s land . In return, Odicio, the elected leader of the Cacataibo people, would stop complaining to authorities about drug traffickers destroying the rainforest to make way for coca fields, processing plants and airstrips. However, Odicio rejected it. “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 drug trafficking.” For the 36-year-old leader of the Native Federation of Cacataibo Communities, the rejection of the offer in September 2020 was the beginning of a nightmare that continues to this day. Graphic death threats via phone, text, social media and, worst of all, from his neighbors drove his family into hiding. He now returns to Yamino only occasionally and is ready to give up his leadership role among the Cacataibo. “If we continue like this, with the progress of drug trafficking, this region will become a second VRAEM,” says Angel Gutiérrez, interim governor of Ucayali, referring to Peru’s main coca-growing zone. The VRAEM – the valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers – produces as much of the leaf as Bolivia. Colombia, the largest supplier of cocaine to the US, is considering decriminalization The reasons for the spread are complex. Ricardo Soberón, head of the national anti-narcotics agency Devida, cites an increase in demand and a slowdown in trade through Peru’s Pacific ports during the pandemic. This made the migration of cultivation eastward, closer to the borders of Colombia, Brazil, and Bolivia, a logical alternative. Soberón believes another factor may be the increased police and military presence in VRAEM. The hilly, forested terrain is also the hideout of the last remnants of the Shining Path, who focus more on providing protection for narcotics than on the Maoist revolution. The group’s leader, Víctor Quispe Palomino, known as Comrade José, was injured in clashes with security forces this month, but remains at large in the valley. Honduran president, Trump ally involved in drug trafficking, tries to win over Biden Encroachment on cultivation in Yaamino and similar communities has piled further pressure on the region’s indigenous groups, who were already struggling with inequality, culture and language loss. The drug traffickers’ bloodbath is the latest assault on the unique cultures of the indigenous groups, who thrived in the rainforest for millennia but have come under attack since the rubber boom began in the 19th century, including the Shining Path massacres in the 1980s. and 1990. and rampant illegal logging more recently. Many indigenous communities here in Ucayali are now overrun by coca fields, with the lives of their leaders threatened. The Washington Post, accompanied by volunteer observers from Yamino, saw many coca plantations and the toxic waste of processing plants, a brief flashback from Odicio’s village. In Brazil, the main driver of deforestation is beef. In Peru, it is believed to be coca. The country is the world’s second largest source of the plant, whose leaves are the main ingredient in cocaine, after Colombia. The coronavirus has pushed up the price of coke. It could reshape the cocaine trade. Cultivation in Ucayali jumped from 1,734 hectares in 2019 to 10,229 hectares in 2021, according to Devida. Meanwhile, the regional government’s forest department has identified 57 secret airstrips carved into the rainforest. Given prohibition, global demand and comparatively low yields for cocoa, coffee and other legal crops, Soberón says, this growth was inevitable—as was the narcotics that accompanied it. “What happened in Herlin is directly linked to the international price of coffee,” he says. “That price should factor in cocaine avoidance, carbon sequestration, and indigenous populations still alive.” Guatemala’s Rainforest: Lush Jungle, Mayan Ruins, and Cocaine-Dense Drugs “We can’t go to the police or prosecutors because they act so slowly anyway,” he says. “And before they do, it sounds like we’ve let them know. We are completely alone.” Gutiérrez, the interim governor – appointed after the governor-elect was detained in December for alleged bribery – acknowledges the problem. “Corruption is institutionalized at every level in Peru,” he says. “This is the sad reality. That’s why citizens don’t trust their authorities.” He also notes a lack of resources: Ucayali police have only a handful of trucks and speedboats to cover 40,000 square miles of jungle. “The solution can’t just be elimination, elimination, elimination,” he says. “Without economic growth, it will be very difficult.” An American murder suspect fled to Mexico. The Gringo Hunters were waiting. President Pedro Castillo, a populist leftist whose base is the rural poor, including coca farmers and indigenous peoples, was notably absent from the issue. The neophyte leader, the target of five separate corruption investigations and barely in power after a disastrous first year, met with indigenous leaders in June but made no commitments. One of those leaders – Berlin Diques, the head of ORAU, the main indigenous federation in Ucayali – is scathing. “It was emotional when Castillo was elected,” he says. “People felt that finally there was a president who would help us. But he broke every promise. He’s just the same as everyone else.” The interior ministry, which has been led by seven different ministers since Castillo took office in July 2021, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice agreed that there was a need to provide more support to threatened indigenous leaders, but said the government was working to “make visible” the issue. The war next door: Conflict in Mexico displaces thousands Yaamino’s monitors spend half their time patrolling the village’s 112 square miles of forest using a drone provided by the environment ministry. They are also telling coca farmers – often landless migrants escaping poverty in the Andes – to leave. Some growers are friendly, the monitors say, but others threaten them with machetes and rusty shotguns. “They know very well that they are on our land,” says César López, 36. “But they can be quite stubborn. Some of them even ask what we are doing here.” Observers are careful to avoid gunmen who guard the fields on behalf of the Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian gangs that buy the coca. From there, it is processed and shipped north to the United States and elsewhere. It is legal to grow coca in Peru, but only for home use – mainly, chewing dried leaves as a mild stimulant. But cultivation now far exceeds domestic consumption. At night, strange explosions shook the rainforest around Yaamino, an attempt to intimidate the community, locals say. In the neighboring village of Mariscal Cáceres, they say, unknown armed men have stopped traffic on the main road in recent weeks to ask where Cacataibo leaders are and, in one case, pistol-whipped a villager. In the long, fraught effort to recapture Mexican drug lord Caro Quintero Traffickers are also now operating in a 580-square-mile reserve for the last remaining uncontacted Cacataibo, according to the Ucayali Forest Service, which has conducted overflights. The reserve was created last year after a two-decade campaign, but is now marred by coca fields and two airstrips. The reserve is the starting point of a corridor inhabited by some of the last tribes on Earth still living in isolation. It stretches 300 miles northeast to Javari, the Brazilian reserve where journalist Dom Phillips, a former Washington Post contributor, and indigenous advocate Bruno Pereira were killed in June. “We can defend our land, up to a point, but…
