The drug lords call Uchiza “the gateway to heaven.” Having bought off or fought off all potential threats, traffickers are now running more than 30 flights a month to Colombia from Uchiza’s tiny airstrip. During the dry season, there can be as many as seven cocaine-laden flights per day. The traffickers are virtually untouchable, largely because they pay as much as $15,000 per flight in protection money. No wonder the Army and the Shining Path guerrillas battle so fiercely for control of the Upper Huallaga Valley. In Uchiza, traffickers reportedly pay off both just to safe.
Were it not for the drug trade, Uchiza might not exist. The hills around town, once carpeted with dense jungle forest, have been cleared for the production of coca; nearly 62,000 acres are cultivated around Uchiza alone. Though cut off from the rest of Peru by the soaring Andes, Uchiza’s economy runs almost solely on dollars. Even coca pickers are paid their daily wages in $1 bills: three grimy George Washingtons. The hordes of young men in Uchiza use their greenbacks to buy souped-up motorcycles or to kill time in the “Miami Bar/Disco,” named for the city that ultimately buys their goods. Behind the bar, intelligence sources say, there are chemical-storage facilities and small labs that produce coca paste and base. “They put the labs in Uchiza for security reasons,” says Iban de Rementeria, a drug expert with the Andean Commission of Jurists. “The police can’t enter Uchiza, nor can Shining Path.”
Thanks to the Army, Uchiza remains impregnable. Back in 1989, the traffickers’ henchmen-no one is quite sure who-attacked the lone police outpost in Uchiza, killing three officers and forcing the police to abandon the town. The Army, whose base is just one mile up the road, did nothing. The United States thought it could disrupt the drug trade by building a base just a few miles north in Santa Lucia. But even with hundreds of Peruvian police, a dozen U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and eight helicopters, the base has done little to limit trafficking. The police, in fact, carried out only half as many drug busts in 1991 as they did in 1990, as coca labs moved from the jungle into secure urban areas like Lima-and Uchiza.
Lately there has been increasing evidence that the Army is actively participating in the drug trade and opposing interdiction efforts. Just north of Uchiza the main road has been widened and flattened-but only for a few hundred yards. Intelligence sources in Lima say the “road” is now being used as an airstrip by drug-trafficking planes. Adding insult to injury: the strip was built with government equipment and money–and with the obvious approval of the Army at a base a few hundred yards away. On several occasions, Army troops have even opened fire on counternarcoties police. Last October soldiers shot at two police choppers-each with a DEA agent aboard-as they were landing to search a boat on the Huallaga River. No one was injured, but the operation was aborted.
The drug trade has not escaped totally unscathed. Up in the hills above Uchiza, coca-growing peasants say they are being driven to ruin by a deadly fungus-disseminated, they claim, by DEA planes. The charges are unsubstantiated, but nearly a third of the coca bushes around Uchiza have turned brittle and died. Many peasants are moving their coca fields further into the jungle-and seeking Army help. “The campesinos run in terror from the DEA and the police,” says a captain at the Uchiza Army base. “We can’t turn our backs on them now.” The last time they did-during a U.S.-led eradication campaign in the late 1980s-the peasants switched allegiance to the Shining Path. The Army is not about to sacrifice that support again.
