Cocaine returns from the ground up in Peru

SANTA LUCIA, PERU — Rustic mule trains ferry vital chemicals to clandestine jungle labs.

Booby-trapped fields ward off intruders.

Trekkers never seen on the Discovery Channel backpack the prized finished product on epic journeys from steamy Amazon hideaways to chilly highland distribution depots.

And a shadowy remnant of the notorious Shining Path rebel army, led by a charismatic man named Artemio, uses its muscle to pocket a fortune in a sinister protection racket.

Peru's cocaine industry, the world's largest and most violent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is again on the upswing. Plots of coca bushes, whose leaves yield cocaine, have increased by about one-third since 1999, to about 127,000 acres, according to Peruvian and United Nations estimates.

And this time, the traffickers may be more difficult to combat because the flashy kingpins from Colombia have been replaced by a piecemeal network, a sort of gold rush of international entrepreneurs.

Production is still well below the record highs of the early 1990s, and neighboring Colombia has surpassed Peru as the global cocaine leader, supplying 90% of the U.S. market, according to the State Department. Moreover, President Alan Garcia is a staunch foe of the drug.

"Peru will not resign itself to be a country of narco-trafficking," vowed the pro-U.S. Garcia, who took office in 2006.

But Peru, the world's No. 2 supplier, feeds a booming demand in Brazil, Europe, East Asia and as far away as Australia, authorities say. The density of coca plantings has doubled in some cases, experts say, and the fertilizer-nourished leaf now yields a greater proportion of cocaine alkaloid, the active ingredient in cocaine.

A wave of drug-related lawlessness -- assassinations, ambushes, threats against prosecutors -- has fanned fears of the kind of narco-instability that afflicts Colombia and Mexico. The Tijuana cartel is suspected in the 2006 slaying in Lima, the Peruvian capital, of a judge hearing a case against an alleged cartel capo.

And renewed militancy among the peasants who grow the coca leaf has sparked road closures and violent clashes with law enforcement officers.

The Garcia administration initially agreed to suspend eradication efforts, a mainstay of the U.S.-backed anti-drug policy. But Garcia later reversed course and even suggested that clandestine laboratories be raided and bombed. With U.S. aid that totals about $50 million a year, Peru has trained and deployed hundreds of anti-drug police officers.