Drug production creates an ecological nightmare - pesticides used to cultivate cocaine in Peru

Insight on the News, August 22, 1994 by Michael Hedges

Coca cultivation has devastated the Amazon region of Peru. Growers have defoliated and poisoned the land and rivers with pesticides and other chemicals. Yet there's little authorities can do.

Viewed from an airplane flying over the Huallaga River Valley in eastern Peru, the emerald carpet of this part of the Amazon basin is scarred by ugly black, gray and brown swaths. The black patches mark where coca growers have burned out new planting areas; the gray ones are abandoned fields; the brown are scars left behind as barren mountainsides have tumbled into rivers, causing unprecedented flooding throughout the region.

After two decades of supplying the world's cocaine markets, the valley is showing obvious effects. But officials here are most concerned about the environmental hazards that cannot be seen. "Nobody has studied the impact on people of the chemicals put in the rivers by coca growers"' says Rafael Urrelo Guerra, rector of the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in the town of Tingo Maria.

Coca growers dominate life in the Huallaga Valley They dump kerosene, sulfuric acid, acetone, pesticides and other chemicals used to grow and process their crop into the tributaries that eventually find their way to the Amazon River. "Coca leaves have received far more chemicals - fungicides, pesticides and herbicides - than other crops for which it wouldn't be economically feasible to spend so much says Jose Loayza Thrres, vice rector of the agrarian university. In places, the drinking water has become discolored and carries an astringent smell. Children who spend hours stamping coca leaves in pits may be absorbing toxic chemicals through their skin, say Peruvian medical experts.

Less than 20 years ago, the Huallaga and Ucayali rivers and their tributaries teemed with fish that supported an exploding human population. "I remember when the fisherman caught Boca Chica fish here like this," Urrelo says, holding his hands 2 feet apart. "Now they don't catch any, or just very small ones. The small rivers are dead."

While the social impact of cocaine has been well documented in Peru and the United States, the environmental destruction wrought by coca planting in the Andes has been largely ignored. But it is a major factor in what some scientists contend is a looming catastrophe for this jungle basin. The Peruvian professors estimate that almost 750,000 acres have been stripped of natural cover for coca planting. The U.S. State Department's estimate is nearly 500,000 acres.

Warren Hern of the University of Colorado has spent much of the last 30 years in the Ucayali River region. The twin factors of population growth and deforestation are creating an "end-stage ecological destruction," he says. "What is happening here at a frightening pace will make [the region look like] Ethiopia and Somalia in 50 years. The process appears inexorable."

The first wave of environmental damage was caused by timber companies that indiscriminately cut the forests, say Urrelo and Hern. But beginning in the 1970s, the profits from coca leaves made that crop the driving economic force in the region. "It has destroyed the economy, where people can't be self-sufficient by farming other crops because the prices for coca leaves are so high," says Hern. "Ecologically, it is completely destructive to the most biodiverse area on the planet." Some species of plants and birds vanished before scientists could identify them, he contends. "In 1964, you could travel not far from here and see 400 to 500 species of birds in a day, as many as there are in the whole United States. In 1984, Id take that same trip and see 40 to 50 kinds. Now I might see four or five."

Lloyd Armstead, technical and liaison officer for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, agrees that coca growing has devastated the valley. "The destructive slash-and-burn agriculture has changed river flows, stripping off top-soils and exposing underlying sand soils."

Armstead believes the Huallaga region's coca cultivators "are rapidly eliminating one of the most genetically prosperous ecosystems of the entire Amazon River basin." Devastating floods in November 1987 that killed scores of people in the valley were caused in part by hillsides sliding into rivers after being stripped by coca growers.

Coca growing in the Huallaga Valley is inextricably linked to the guerrilla war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian military and police. As many as 30,000 people were killed in the fighting in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In March 1989, Peruvian officers say, the guerrillas overran a garrison at Uchiza, killing 16 officers and suspected informants. "They took the wounded officers and tied them to explosive charges, which they detonated," a law-enforcement official says. "Others, they ran over their heads with heavy equipment." The military and police have responded with equal brutality, according to some reports.

The war turned in favor of the government with the capture of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman in September 1992. But there was skirmishing in the valley as recently as June.