For rural communities living in poverty on the remote eastern flanks of the Peruvian Andes, leaves from the coca bush offer by far the best return of any cash crop. For that reason, Peru became the world’s second-largest producer of cocaine, exporting an estimated 850 tons of it each year. To address this supply side of the counternarcotics puzzle, the United States launched development programs in Peru back in 1981, incentivizing small farmers to switch to alternatives like coffee and cacao. Since 2001, the U.S. Agency for International Development had distributed more than $1.8 billion for economic development in the Andean nation. No more. Even as President Donald Trump uses counternarcotics to justify blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, his shuttering of USAID earlier this year means that already booming cocaine production could now surge further. There is currently a lack of data on USAID’s alternative crop programs in Peru. Yet according to local reporting, there are 281,000 acres of alternative crops in Peru where coca once grew, cultivated by 87,000 families. If they all revert to growing coca, it would more than double Peru’s already rising cocaine output. The risk of a cocaine surge is heightened by Peru’s chronic political crisis, with a deeply unpopular Congress widely accused of complicity with organized crime. Lawmakers—dozens of whom are under investigation for corruption—have just ousted the chief prosecutor Delia Espinoza, completing their capture of key institutions. That could empower not just the drug cartels but also other sectors of Peru’s sprawling underground economy, including illegal gold mining. Washington has also long supported Peruvian law enforcement, providing more than $350 million from 2015 until the end of the Joe Biden administration for a range of activities. These included crop eradication and interdiction of cocaine, as well as policing of illegal gold mining. Cut to that aid worries observers who see potential for growing synergies between the cocaine and gold trades, especially with the former using the latter to launder profits. For now, the White House’s tough talk and bellicose actions are intended to give the impression of decisive action to curb the flow of illegal drugs to the United States. But its policies in Peru may actually encourage a spike in the global cocaine supply.
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