Ricardo Soberón, the new head of Devida, Peru’s anti-drugs agency, has been coming in for heavy criticism from the political opposition, which says he is acting as the advocate for the coca growers and is determined to put an end to the eradication of coca plantations. Soberón, who has long maintained that eradication has not ‘worked’, has come up with a plan for ‘reduction’ rather than eradication, accompanied by measures to ‘choke’ the cocaine industry — a Peruvian version of the ‘zero cocaine’ policy adopted by Bolivia in place of the previous ‘zero coca’ approach.
On the supply side, Soberón’s plan envisages building on the already existing voluntary eradication scheme, which has enjoyed some success. This depends largely on the promotion of alternative crops that promise a better return than coca. It also envisages the forcible eradication of coca plantations in protected areas (such as national parks), those found close to maceration pits (which indicate a direct connection with the cocaine processing industry) and large plantations whose owners choose not to enter the voluntary eradication scheme.
To ‘choke’ the cocaine industry he proposes, at one end, the interdiction of precursor chemicals, and at the other, a clampdown on money laundering. Soberón has been quite outspoken about the obstacles facing these policies. In various forms, they add up to corruption, collusion between officialdom and the drugs industry, and a substantial measure of suspicious negligence.
In his own agency, Devida, which he describes as ‘absolutely dependent’ on international cooperation, Soberón says he has found evidence of funds going to non-existent projects, overvalued consultancy work and unexplained transfers. In Devida, he says, ‘administrative and personal corruption runs deep and is enormous.’ Police corruption ‘is absolutely grave’, while the interior ministry has been showing over the past couple of years a distinct lack of enthusiasm for establishing checkpoints to detect and halt shipments of precursor chemicals.
So far, both Prime Minister Salomón Lerner and President Ollanta Humala have publicly stated their confidence in Soberón, dismissing opposition claims that his policies are at odds with those of Humala.
Criticism of Soberón rose to a first peak when he announced a ‘pause’ in coca eradication on 17 August to ‘reassess’ the overall policy. Eradication was resumed on 23 August. Eight days later, the interior ministry was announcing that Corah (the eradication scheme for the Upper Huallaga area), together with police and ministry officials, had uprooted 232 hectares of coca plantations in Ucayali and Huánuco and located and destroyed 17 labs.
On 11 September the coca growers of Ucayali launched an ‘indefinite strike’ to demand an end to forcible eradication, blocking 32 kilometres of highways in Aguaytía, in the province of Padre Abad. The government responded by declaring a 60-day state of emergency in the area and the interior ministry announced that it would prosecute those responsible for the roadblocks.
Two days later, the government extended for a further 60 days the existing state of emergency in districts and provinces of Ucayali, Huánuco and San Martín due to the continuing presence of Sendero Luminoso (SL) guerrillas. On 15 September the coca growers accepted a government offer to dialogue and lifted the blockade; a day later the ‘strike’ was suspended for 15 days.
