-Caveat Lector- Coca keeps poor Peru farmers hooked -- to survive APURIMAC-ENE VALLEY, Peru (Reuters) -- For 10 hours a day, Lucia Huarca strips green coca leaves off bushes with callused hands and collects her harvest in her wide blue skirt alongside fellow women day-laborers and their children in ragged, filthy T-shirts in a field in Peru's southern jungle. Her day's haul -- typically 66 lbs (30 kilos), for which she will get paid around $3 -- will probably end up in the hands of drugs traffickers to be transformed into cocaine. Despite a decade-long, U.S.-backed crackdown to strangle the drug trade at source in the world's No. 2 cocaine producing country, coca cultivation is thriving -- even spreading -- where Huarca works in the lush Apurimac-Ene valley across the Andes, some 520 miles (830 km) southeast of Lima. "We live off coca because we're poor. Without it, our children can't eat," said Huarca, 52, as she harvested a field in Pichari where stray coffee plants nestling among the coca bushes bear witness to the plot's now-abandoned crop. A few yards away, men with picks cleared ferns ready for replanting with coca -- a sacred plant for Peru's Inca emperors and still enthusiastically -- and legally -- chewed by Andean people as a cure for altitude sickness and to alleviate hunger, and harvested as an ingredient in Coca Cola. Coca can be sold legally to the State Coca Co. but it offers lower prices than do drug traffickers. Meanwhile, glutted markets and plunging world prices for traditional coffee and cocoa output have turned coca leaf into the only viable cash crop and backbone of the local economy. Such a picture is not likely to cheer U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell when he visits Peru and Colombia, the world's cocaine capital, from Monday to Wednesday for a visit in which fighting the drug trade will be high on the agenda. Peru is already complaining that its skies are inundated with drug smugglers after Washington halted joint surveillance flights in April, when Peru's air force killed an American missionary and her baby after mistaking their plane for traffickers. Stark reality Peru's eradication efforts in the 1990s made it a key ally in Washington's regional drug war. But analysts say the illicit trade here has been boosted by the U.S.-backed anti-drug Plan Colombia, spurring prices which coffee, cocoa and alternative crops such as fruit and palm hearts cannot hope to match and leaving dirt-poor farmers little choice but to depend on coca. Producers say export-ready coffee fetches just 60 cents a kilo, a big loss on the $1.52 each kilo costs to produce. Coca goes for up to $2.30 on the black market. Farmers say they would have to sell eight kilos of coffee to buy one of beef. Despite official figures, experts say the stark reality is that Peru's coca production is rising again. Some hills are literally covered with closely-packed, vivid green coca bushes and in villages and on many roadsides, carpets of leaves left out to dry in the sun are common. -- Best wishes I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way. -Robert Frost (1874-1963), 1935 <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
