Does Europe's coke habit mean massacring ‘uncontacted’ indigenous people?
Andes to the Amazon
Does Europe's coke habit mean massacring ‘uncontacted’ indigenous people?
Reported killings in the Amazon are thought to have been committed by drugs traffickers
David Hill
Tuesday 13 January 2015 11.36 EST
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.”
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2015/jan/13/european-coke-habit-massacring-uncontacted-indigenous-people
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