Peruvian-made PBC, after slipping north, fueled the explosive birth of the Medellín and other Colombian drug cartels. Illicit cocaine was born with Peruvian smugglers, the 1949 Balarezo gang, and by the 1970s, was booming in the wild tropical Upper Huallaga Valley, just downstream from Huánuco. Legal cocaine, increasingly controlled, declined as an export commodity, and Peru was effectively left the world’s sole producer by the late 1940s, when Washington’s cold-war era anti-drug pressures sent the drug into clandestine channels. It is not just this historic linkage, but also modernizing innovations, such as Peruvian pharmacist Alfredo Bignon’s 1885 invention of a cheap processing method, the antecedent to today’s peasant-made pasta básica de cocaína (PBC), or cocaine base paste, that have made Peru the homeland of cocaine. national soft-drink, Coca-Cola) gravitated to Peru.īy 1900, Peru’s eastern Huánuco province dominated global cocaine, selling about 10 tons, perfectly legal, around the world. Legal exports of processed cocaine and in dried leaf for syrups (still found as a flavoring in the U.S. When European chemists extracted the alkaloid cocaine from the leaf in 1860, it was soon used as a medical anesthetic and popular stimulant additive. Use of the sacred leaf became emblematic of pan-Andean culture during the reign of Tahuantinsuyo, the fifteenth-century empire of the Incas rooted in highland Cuzco. The coca bush itself, Erythroxylon coca, botanists suggest, originated at least 8,000 years ago in what is now tropical northwestern Peru. Historians also see in this dramatic role reversal a return to Peru’s longer historical relation with cocaine. In terms of the global availability of drugs, the costs and steep human damage of the international drug war are ultimately futile. International drug policy critics see this dramatic shift back to Peru, underway since about 2005, as a perfect example of the so-called “balloon effect”: push on drugs hard enough in one place and they simply scatter over borders to other illicit sites. Peru manufactured about 340 tons of the drug, most of which successfully reaches its global consumers via aerial smuggling routes to the south.
Colombia’s success in dispersing the trafficking groups that once plagued the country means that it could only muster 309 tons of cocaine, less than half its former peak. After a decade of heavy eradication efforts, Colombia had significantly cut its coca crop to under 50,000 hectares, whilst Peru’s has soared to over 60,000. UN drug agencies broke the news in 2013 that Peru-not Colombia-had achieved the dubious distinction of becoming-once again-the world’s leading source for cocaine on the global market. A cocalero packing coca leaves (Richard Kernaghan)
0 kommentar(er)
