Reuters/Lima


Peru, the world’s top cocaine producer, will destroy 75% of coca fields in a lawless jungle area controlled by insurgents, marking the first eradication effort in the rebel-held territory, an official said.
Carmen Masias, the head of the anti-drug agency Devida, said anti-narcotics police backed by military forces will uproot coca plants - the key ingredient in cocaine - over 15,000 hectares of the southeastern Amazonian region known as the VRAEM.
The collection of river valleys is the most densely planted coca-growing area in the world and the favoured hideout of a group of Shining Path rebels who got involved in the drug trade after their leaders were captured in the 1990s.
With an estimated 200 to 500 members, the Shining Path no longer represents a strategic threat to the state. But the Maoist-inspired rebels have killed some 65 police and military officers in recent years.
The government’s VRAEM eradication goal accounts for half of the 30,000 hectares of coca fields targeted for destruction in all of Peru this year.
“It’s an ambitious goal but not if we consider that the VRAEM is where 54% of the coca in the country is,” Masias said.
Coca grows three times more densely in the VRAEM than in other parts of Peru. The region is also home to the country’s main natural gas reserves, which President Ollanta Humala has vowed to fully tap to meet soaring domestic demand for electricity.
An expansion of the country’s main natural gas pipeline has been delayed in part because of security concerns after the Shining Path kidnapped - and later released unharmed - 36 pipeline workers in 2012.
Humala, a retired military officer who fought the Shining Path as a major in the early ‘90s’ has vowed to stamp out what remains of the group by cutting off their main source of financing - drug trafficking.
At the start of 2013 the government also said it would begin eradication efforts in the VRAEM that year but ended up holding off.
Masias said it was never an explicit goal, and that the killing and capture of important Shining Path leaders last year now makes wresting control of the area easier.
The government will also redouble efforts to intercept the growing number of small planes that fly cocaine from Peru to other countries, Masias said. Peru has already been conducting “non-lethal” aerial interceptions together with its neighbour Brazil, considered the world’s second-biggest buyer of the drug and the main destination for most Peruvian cocaine.