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Washington's best hope for an effective attack against Peru's coca producers was a U.S.-financed, 220-man force called the Rural Mobile Patrol Unit. Yet hardly had the understaffed and poorly equipped force entered the field than it was shadowed by rumors--all of which it denies--that it was under-reporting drug seizures, making wrongful arrests and openly filching money and goods from peasant homes. In retaliation, guerrilla-directed campesinos bombed police stations and ambushed drug busters. A score of policemen were killed. As the mutinous spirit quickened, the government of President Fernando Belaunde Terry began to fear that guerrillas might exploit the drug-related troubles even further. Last August the President declared a state of emergency and sent 1,000 troops to restore order. They did so--by telling the antinarcotics squad to halt its war against drugs.
Even as coca production continues to thrive in Peru and Bolivia, it has also begun to explode in previously undeveloped areas, such as Brazil's Amazon River Basin, a wilderness of lush jungles and rivers that is almost two-thirds the size of the U.S. Three years ago, policemen noticed that relatively primitive Indians were suddenly sporting modern clothes and traveling in motorboats. The peasants, they learned, had been pressured by Colombians into cultivating epadu, a shrubby small tree that can grow in the forest and attain a height of 10 ft. Epadu contains about 40% less active alkaloid than the more common coca variety cultivated in the Andes and yields less pure cocaine per kilo. But it costs the trafficker 60% less to buy and can sprout as many as 30 shoots, often very rapidly. "It's easier to grow than any other crop in the Amazon," says a U.S. embassy official. Brazil has also begun to master the more advanced stages of the trade. Last fall alone, twelve Brazilians were caught in the act of carrying cocaine to the U.S. Shipments of illegally imported processing chemicals have also been intercepted with increasing frequency. Most of all, coke preprocessing plants have begun sprouting up in the Brazilian backcountry. By now, says Dr. Juarez Tavares, the federal criminal prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has become "the distribution center for cocaine leaving South America."
The Brazilian government has not pursued the trade with notable zeal. On the books in Brazil is 1980 legislation under which foreign drug dealers, if caught, can be expelled rather than imprisoned. That, says Tavares, is "an open signal that the narcos have nothing to fear in Brazil." Dealers who wind up behind bars, moreover, manage to get free relatively easily. Last year, a Colombian who had set up a refinery just outside Rio simply walked out of a federal maximum-security prison and away from a 27-year sentence. Not long thereafter, a prison guard who claimed that the fugitive had taken his gun was temporarily dismissed.