South America Needs Co-Ordinated Response to Combat Scourge of Cocaine Marie Delcas - Guardian Weekly
go to original December 17, 2013

A girl plays in a bed of coca leaves, in the village of Trincavini in Peru’s Pichari district. Pichari lies on the banks of the Apurimac river in a valley that the United Nations says yields 56 percent of Peru's coca leaves, the basis for cocaine. Coca is central to rituals and religion in Andean culture but in recent decades has become more associated with global drug trafficking. (Associated Press/Rodrigo Abd)

An Air France flight arrived from Caracas carrying 31 suitcases packed with the precious powder. Fingers were pointed at Venezuela, but in fact the goods came from Colombia. "The narco-traffickers will stop at nothing," says Bogotá's police commissioner. "Organised crime, and its corrupting influence, is at work in every single country in Latin America."

Just look at the news. In the autumn, police in Ecuador seized three tonnes of cocaine, ready to cross the Pacific. Soon after, half a tonne was intercepted in a tanker truck on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. On the heels of that discovery, 1.5 tonnes was intercepted in the port of Piura, Peru. More than 90% of cocaine seizures worldwide occur on the American continent.

Peru is now the top source of coca leaves and cocaine hydrochloride, according to UN figures. Colombia, no longer the market leader, has dropped back to third place, behind Bolivia.

According to the same figures, the latter now supplies half the cocaine consumed in Brazil. With an estimated 900,000 users (out of a total population of nearly 200 million), Latin America's largest country has become the second-largest consumer worldwide, behind the United States.

The geopolitics of cocaine is in constant flux.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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