What might it take to stop people from using, or glamourising the use of, cocaine? The violence, murders and crime endemic to the cocaine trade, perhaps, or the fact it finances terrorism, guerrilla warfare, paramilitaries and myriad other criminal operations.



Either that, or the way it corrupts politics, governments and institutions, or exploits child labour, damages the environment, poses threats to security, development and law, and diverts billions of pounds of public money that could be spent on other things. That’s to say nothing of the devastating impacts of initiatives supposedly intended to crush the trade, including military interventions and the aerial fumigation of coca - the raw material for cocaine - with dangerous chemicals.

If none of the above seem appalling enough, here’s something else: getting the cocaine to market means traffickers invading Peru’s biggest national park and may involve killing indigenous people who live so remotely in the Amazon they are sometimes described, entirely erroneously, as “uncontacted.”

Peru recently overtook Colombia to become the world’s number one cultivator of illegal coca, states the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) World Drug Report 2014. The UNODC’s Humberto Chirinos, based in Peru, told the Guardian the cocaine is exported by boats from ports on the Pacific coast or by air, or, in paste form, by air or overland into neighbouring Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador. Indeed, Chirinos calls Brazil a “new market” for Peru’s cocaine industry: some is for domestic consumption, but most makes its way to “other countries in Europe.”

Reports of “narcos” - often armed and dangerous - moving across the border into Brazil have been coming out of the south-east Peruvian Amazon for years. For example, the River Purus, which births in Peru but drains into the main trunk of the River Amazon, has been used as a transport route since at least the late 1990s, and the Madre de Dios region in particular has seen increased activity in recent years. Evidence of the cocaine trade includes all kinds of things: “narco” sightings, abandoned camps and equipment, boats on the river in the middle of the night, planes overhead, and sometimes death threats to indigenous communities if they don’t collaborate.

In June last year seven indigenous people living in what Peruvian law, the UN and anthropologists call “isolation” or “voluntary isolation” turned up at an Ashéninka village, Simpatia, across the border in Brazil. This, together with the subsequent release of a video of several of the men, sparked massive media interest - and entirely erroneous descriptions of them as “uncontacted” and their encounter with the Ashéninka as “first contact.”

The seven people who arrived at Simpatia are members of one of approximately 20 groups of indigenous people in “isolation” in Peru. Why, given that they usually avoid contact with others and are believed to spend most of their time on the other side of the border, did they suddenly turn up like that?

The Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) issued a statement the following month. It said it had communicated with the group via interpreters and discovered they had “suffered violent attacks by non-Indians in the headwaters of the River Envira in Peruvian territory.”

That was followed by a statement by one of the interpreters, Zé Correia, a Jaminawa man, which appeared on Blog da Amazônia. According to Correia, the “most serious issue” facing the group is:

drugs traffickers and Peruvian loggers. The majority of the contacted group are young. The majority of the older people were massacred by whites from Peru who shot at them and set their houses on fire. They say that many of the older people died. . . They say that so many people died they couldn’t bury them all and their corpses were eaten by vultures.

While it’s true that loggers have previously been reported to shoot and kill indigenous people in “isolation” in Peru, many are pointing the finger at “narcos” this time. That they are operating in the region is no secret. A FUNAI base on the River Envira was invaded by traffickers in 2011, and the Envira offers a comparatively easy connection to the headwaters of the River Inuya and River Mapuya in the adjacent watershed, to the west, which “narcos” have been reported to use for years.

Indigenous organisations in Peru were certainly quick to accuse the “narcos”, saying camps and bullet shells belonging to them had been discovered in the region. According to a statement by Aidesep, based in Lima, and Orpio, based in Iquitos:

In the last few years territories inhabited by peoples in isolation along the Peru-Brazil frontier have been used by people moving drugs from Peru to Brazil... The recent news about a group in isolation in a village along the River Envira, whose members are being exterminated by people carrying out illegal activities, more than demonstrates that our concerns about them being killed are justified.

However, Beatriz Huertas Castillo, a Peruvian anthropologist and the leading authority on indigenous people in “isolation” in Peru, believes it’s not “absolutely certain” drugs traffickers are responsible. She told the Guardian:

Since about 2013 the headwaters of the Envira, where this group comes from, has been free of loggers. That’s why some people believe the “whites” or “non-Indians” who killed various members of this group and burnt their houses must be narcos, rather than loggers, given that this area has become a narco-trafficking route to Brazil. It’s not clear when [the attacks] took place. It seems it was two or three years ago. Currently, the big threat in the upper Envira, in the Alto Purus National Park, is narcos, but if the attacks happened before 2013 it could have been narcos or loggers.

Huertas Castillo says the “narcos” are armed, and further evidence has been found suggesting violent attacks have occurred.

“Against whom?” she asks. “The only other people in that region are indigenous people living in voluntary isolation.”