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Security & Strategic Review - July 2014 (ISSN 1741-4202)

PERU: ‘Narcoflights’ seen increasing; interdiction hampered

Claims have been made that the number of flights on Peru’s cocaine airbridge has been increasing, and that traffickers may have been testing the use of bigger aircraft to carry the drug. In the mean time interdiction of the ‘narcoflights’ (on the ground, since Peru does not have a shootdown policy) is hampered by the lack of radar surveillance, and acquiring it is taking time.

On 3 July the joint command of Peru’s armed forces announced that joint military-police operations in the last week of June had led to the location and destruction of 12 clandestine airstrips (designated PACs, for pistas de aterrizaje clandestinas) in the Vraem portions of three regions: Río Tambo and Pangoa, Satipo, Junín; Llochegua, Huanta, Ayacucho; and Pichari, La Convención, Cusco. Almost a fortnight later a military patrol seized on the ground a light aircraft in Satipo, Junín — the third such occurrence so far this year.

One thing the authorities appear to have missed, according to ‘sources in the know’ cited by Gustavo Gorriti of IDL-Reporteros, was the mid-June landing in the Vraem of a bimotor with the capacity to carry 800 kilos of cocaine — more than twice the regular cargo of the Cessnas that ply their trade on the clandestine Peru-Bolivia airbridge. Should the traffickers find feasible the use of larger aircraft, the flow could increase considerably.

Gorriti notes that the ground-based flight monitoring (which lacks radars) indicates that four to six flights take place every day, each carrying 300 kilos of cocaine, but that ‘human intelligence sources’ claim that the number of flights, adding those in the Vraem and the Pichis-Palcazú valley, has increased recently to 8-10 a day. At six flights a day the traffic adds up to 54 tonnes (t) a month; at eight to 72t.

In late June Gorriti asked defence minister Pedro Cateriano about this situation. He said his information did not tally with the claim of 8-10 flights a day: ‘It is a journalistic source and I can’t verify it. I don’t have that figure. There are statistics and reports which indicate that there are approximately four flights a day.’

Cateriano’s explanation of what has been happening was that, with the deaths last August of the Sendero Luminoso (SL) leaders known as ‘Alipio’ and ‘Gabriel’, the drug traffickers ‘stopped paying a toll to the terrorists [and] paradoxically, this blow against terrorism led to the facilitation in the Vraem of this illicit air traffic.’

He explained that the absence of radar surveillance was due to Peru’s agreement not to use the radar lent by the US for purposes of aerial interdiction, and that in any case that radar is in need of repair. Tenders, he said, have been invited for the supply of four radars and at present Peru is awaiting the technical specifications which the air force must assess.

This means that there is no firm delivery date yet, at best, Cateriano conceded, it could be ‘in the coming months of the second half of this year’. Gorriti’s arithmetic is that each month that passes means at least 180 more ‘narcoflights’.

End of preview - This article contains approximately 512 words.

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