Clandestine runway in new Amazon reserve highlights drugs danger to remote tribes
Indigenous people in "isolation" in Peru under increasing threat from cocaine trade and logging
Try thinking of the victims of the global cocaine trade and any number of people might readily come to mind. The 100,000s of Mexicans who have been murdered, perhaps, or the however many small-scale farmers, indigenous people and community leaders in countries like Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru who have suffered untold abominations. The 10,000s who have “disappeared”, or the women trafficked for sex. The innocent bystanders caught up in all the purported attempts to combat the business, like the so-called “War on Drugs”, or the casualties of the corruption, organised crime and terrorism that it finances or facilitates. . .
And so on and so on.
Rather less obvious are the small bands of indigenous people living in “isolation” in the Peruvian Amazon whose territories are as remote as anywhere on the planet, yet still not out-of-the-way enough to escape the cocaine industry’s reach. Although the impacts on these groups remain poorly understood, it is clear that for years now international demand for “snow”, “blow”, “nose candy” or whatever you want to nickname it has encouraged invasions of their territories, thereby inciting settlement, infrastructure development, deforestation, pollution and potential violence or the transmission of fatal germs and diseases if contact between them and the “narcos” occurs.
In other words, cocaine, unlikely as it seems, has become one of the biggest dangers to the lives and land of some of the world’s most remote-living indigenous peoples.
The reason that this has happened is because Peru is one of the world’s top two producers of the coca plant, the key raw material, and because some cocaine - or at least a coca-derived substance that is subsequently turned into cocaine - is smuggled into neighbouring Brazil across their 3,000 kilometre Amazonian border, an unpatrolled drug-runner’s paradise which makes securing the US-Mexico perimeter seem a doddle by comparison. And it is right where many of Peru’s indigenous people in “isolation” live.
Indeed, the only group - or at least remains of a group - in this part of the world to have emerged from “isolation”, so to speak, in the last decade appears to have done so following some kind of an attack - or slaughter - perpetrated by cocaine traffickers. Some of that contact process, which apparently began in June 2014 just over the border in Brazil, was filmed and went viral, initially on YouTube, before making global media headlines and becoming the subject of an award-winning but deeply problematic documentary, “First Contact”, broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4, which I critiqued for The Guardian.
“Before uncontacted Indians were killed by loggers,” said Peruvian anthropologist Beatriz Huertas Castillo in a telling statement to another Guardian writer at the time. “Now they are killed by drug traffickers.”
Evidence of these goings-on can be hard to detect and document, for obvious reasons, but the Lima-based indigenous federation AIDESEP has just produced a map of Peru’s newest off-limits reserve for indigenous people in “isolation” that features a “clandestine runway”, marked by a red plane. No prizes for guessing what that’s for. According to AIDESEP, the runway is roughly in the centre of the northern half of the Kakataibo Reserve, which was finally established in July 2021 after a more than 20 year struggle.
AIDESEP’s map makes it clear just how under threat the “isolated” Kakataibo are - not just from the cocaine trade, but from two logging concessions overlapping their reserve. Conspicuously, the most concentrated deforestation has taken place near the clandestine runway.
Regional indigenous federations like ORAU and FENACOCA, together with AIDESEP, have been urging the Ministry of Culture (MINCU), the government agency responsible for establishing and running these kinds of reserves, to take urgent, effective action. In a recent letter to MINCU, ORAU’s president Berlín Diques Ríos emphasised the dangers posed to the “isolated” Kakataibo by both “narco-trafficking” and the logging concessions, which he said have been facilitating the drugs operations, before reminding the Ministry about a Lima judge’s ruling last year ordering it to protect the reserve.
How is MINCU responding? María Trigoso Barentzen, director of the Ministry’s Office of Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact, tells me they met ORAU just a few days ago and they have urged Huánuco’s regional government to consider extinguishing one of the logging concessions, as well as requesting them and two other regional governments to modify the areas where concessions can be established, presumably so this sort of problem doesn’t recur in the future. She also says MINCU has been coordinating with other state institutions, including the National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (DEVIDA) and other agencies involved in fighting drugs trafficking, as well as the national forests agency SERFOR.
“We’re alerting other sectors in the three levels of government about threats to the reserves,” Trigoso Barentzen says. “Narco-trafficking, like any other illicit activity, directly affects indigenous peoples, especially those in isolation and initial contact, and it constantly challenges us to remain alert and work together to eradicate it.”