Cocaine trade revitalizes Peruvian rebels

updated 3:25 p.m. ET May 10, 2009

UNION MANTARO, Peru - The last town on a rutted dirt road in Peru's most prolific cocaine-producing highland valley, Union Mantaro has no police post, no church and no health clinic. Its 600 people lack running water and electricity.

Until January, makeshift huts of wood and plastic housed scores of refugees from a government offensive against a small but lethal band of drug-funded rebels, revitalized remnants of the fanatical Shining Path guerrilla movement.

Most have since returned to outlying mountain villages as the rebels frustrated the army's campaign against them, killing 33 soldiers and wounding 48 since the military arrived in August. The rebel death toll is unknown.

The army's setbacks — the narcotics trade does not appear to have been dented — are more than a worrisome embarrassment for the central government in faraway Lima. Critics say President Alan Garcia needs to act fast or risk greater instability.

Booming after a 1990s drop-off
Peru's cocaine trade — No. 2 after Colombia's — is booming after a 1990s drop-off. The government calls the insurgents who've used it to rearm ideologically bankrupt, but peasants who have coexisted with them don't necessarily agree. At least not publicly.

The gateway to the Shining Path's jungle-draped stronghold, Union Mantaro is a bumpy two-day drive down the Andes' eastern slopes from the provincial capital of Ayacucho, where the movement was born nearly three decades ago.

Along the road into the Apurimac and Ene valley, women and children dry coca leaves on long canvas beds in front of half-built, brick homes. A pro-coca political party has painted the leaf on wooden shacks in villages so poor that parents must chip in to pay teachers' salaries.

Coca production soared in this rugged region just 100 miles from the world-renowned Machu Picchu ruins as migrants more than doubled its population to some 240,000 in little more than a decade.

Legal in Peru
Growing the crop, a mild stimulant widely chewed in the Andes, is legal in Peru, but authorities say nine-tenths of it goes to the illegal manufacture of cocaine.

"Politicians in Lima don't know what's going on in these communities. If they did, they would know the solution to the problem isn't more soldiers," says Marisela Quispe, a government worker who keeps track of victims of political violence.

Experts say the rebel group — Sendero Luminoso in Spanish — now has some 400 well-armed fighters in two separate groups. The larger contingent moves with ease in the lush mountains flanking this valley.

It has spies in every village, allies forged through the drug trade who immediately send word when soldiers head out on patrol, says army Maj. Chirinos Carlos Rivera. His 150 soldiers are based downriver from Union Mantaro.

No alternative to drug trade
The locals, says Quispe, see no alternative to drug trade.

Behind the trappings of a narco-economy — 4x4 pickups and well-stocked agrochemical stores — the valley is poor. More than half the people live on less than $2 a day.

Union Mantaro has long been a drug trade hub. Before the army arrived, guerrillas shouldering AK-47s and Galil assault rifles routinely filed into town to buy supplies, and attracted migrants by offering free land to coca growers.

"They gave you a hand in clearing the jungle, handed out supplies and food, maybe a hatchet. All to help you start out," says Abran Rojas, 27, a coca farmer who arrived in 2006.

He settled in Pampa Aurora, a village of 60 people a six-hour walk above Union Mantaro along a prime smuggling route. He said 10 to 20 smugglers would file past carrying cocaine-filled backpacks a few times a week, accompanied by rebels clad in crisp, dark-blue or green uniforms.

Then came the army offensive.

Soldiers shot and killed four people in one village in September, says Norberto Lanilla, a lawyer representing the victims' relatives.

"They called us terrorists and collaborators. After the killings we had a week to grab what we could and leave," Rojas said of the soldiers.

Refugees deny they are collaborators
Defense Minister Antero Florez defended the soldiers, saying anyone living in the rebel-dominated mountains should be considered an insurgent.

Rojas and other refugees deny they are collaborators. But they say it's best to avoid contact with the military.

"The soldiers try to use you quickly, for information, as guides. But if you guide, 'Los Tios' don't forgive. They kill," Rojas says. The rebels are known as "Los Tios," Spanish for the uncles.

Martin Mejia / AP Police escort two men after they were arrested in Puerto Cocos in Peru's Apurimac Valley.

The government says the repackaged Shining Path differs little from the far larger leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in the neighboring Andean nation. It says they are simply militarized drug gangs.

Rojas and other refugees from Pampa Aurora aren't so sure. They say the Shining Path fighters appear to have a political agenda and sit peasants down every few weeks for lectures.

"They tell you the government has forgotten the poor. That our rights are stomped on by the rich, the police, the military," he said.

It took some persuading, though, to get 33-year-old Obertino Coro to return to Pampa Aurora four years ago, he said.

In 1984, he fled the village after watching guerrillas hack his father, an ex-soldier, and two other men to pieces, then burn the village to the ground. The three men had joined a militia formed to fight Sendero.

'Wolves in sheep's clothes'
Coro returned after running into rebels in the jungle who told him they now reject using violence against civilians.

Which does not mean the new Sendero tolerates military collaborators. It recently hauled away a member of a pro-government militia when it turned back a group of peasants trying to return to Pampa Aurora.

He has not been heard from since.

"They're wolves in sheep's clothes," says Wagner Tineo, chief coordinator of the region's militias, which he said have waned due to government inattention.

Not since the 1990s, under then-President Alberto Fujimori, has the government provided the militias with weapons.

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