Members of the indigenous guard of the native community of Puerto Nuevo, of the Amazonian Kakataibo people, located in the central-eastern jungle of Peru. Credit: Courtesy of Marcelo Odicio

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jul 26 2024 (IPS)

The invasion of lands inhabited by Amazon indigenous communities is growing in Peru, due to drug trafficking mafias that are expanding coca crops to produce and export cocaine, while deforestation and insecurity for the native populations and their advocates are increasing

“Drug trafficking is not a myth or something new in this area, and we are the ones who defend our right to live in peace in our land,” said Kakataibo indigenous leader Marcelo Odicio, from the municipality of Aguaytía, capital of the province of Padre Abad, in the Amazonian department of Ucayali.“We are the ones who pay the consequences, we are visible to criminals, we are branded as informers, but I will continue to defend our rights. Along with the indigenous guard we will ensure that the autonomy of our territory is respected,” Marcelo Odicio.

Of the 33 million inhabitants of the South American country, around 800,000 belong to 51 Amazonian indigenous peoples. Overall, 96.4% of the indigenous population is Quechua and Aymara, six million of whom live in the Andean areas, while the Amazonian jungle peoples account for the remaining 3.6%.

The Peruvian government is constantly criticised for failing to meet the needs and demands of this population, who suffer multiple disadvantages in health, education, income generation and access to opportunities, as well as the growing impact of drug trafficking, illegal logging and mining.

A clear example of this is the situation of the Kakataibo people in two of their native communities, Puerto Nuevo and Sinchi Roca, in the border between the departments of Huánuco and Ucayali, in the central-eastern Peruvian jungle region.

For years they have been reporting and resisting the presence of invaders who cut down the forests for illegal purposes, while the government pays no heed and takes no action.

The most recent threat has led them to deploy their indigenous guard to defend themselves against new groups of outsiders who, through videos, have proclaimed their decision to occupy the territories over which the Kakataibo people have ancestral rights, which are backed by titles granted by the departmental authorities.

Six Kakataibo leaders who defended their lands and way of life were murdered in recent years. The latest was Mariano Isacama, whose body was found by the indigenous guard on Sunday 14 July after being missing for weeks.

In his interview with IPS, Odicio, president of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities (Fenacoka), lamented the authorities’ failure to find Isacama. The leader from the native community of Puerto Azul had been threatened by people linked to drug trafficking, suspects the federation.

Marcelo Odicio, president of the Native Federation of Kakataibo Communities, headquartered in the town of Aguaytía, in the department of Ucayal, in the Peruvian Amazon. Credit: Inforegión

During a press conference in Lima on 17 July, the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle (Aidesep), that brings together 109 federations representing 2,439 native communities, deplored the government’s indifference in the situation of the disappeared and murdered leader, which brings to 35 the number of Amazonian indigenous people murdered between 2023 and 2024.

Aidesep declared the territory of the Amazonian indigenous peoples under emergency and called for self-defence and protection mechanisms against what they called “unpunished violence unleashed by drug trafficking, mining and illegal logging under the protection of authorities complicit in neglect, inaction and corruption.”

Lack of vision for the Amazon

The province of Aguaytía, where the municipality of Padre de Abad is located and where the Kakataibo live, among other indigenous peoples, will account for 4.3% of the area under coca leaf cultivation by 2023, around 4,019 hectares, according to the latest report by the government’s National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs (Devida).

It is the sixth largest production area of this crop in the country.

The report highlights that Peru reduced illicit coca crops by just over 2% between 2022 and 2023, from 95,008 to 92,784 hectares, thus halting the trend of permanent expansion over the last seven years.

These figures are called into question by Ricardo Soberón, an expert on drug policy, security and Amazonia.

Ricardo Soberón, a renowned Peruvian expert on drug policy, Amazonia and security. Credit: Walter Hupiú / IPS

“The latest World Drug Report indicates that we have gone from 22 to 23 million cocaine users, and that the golden triangle in Burma, the triple border of Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil and the Amazonian trapezoid are privileged areas for production and export,” Soberón told IPS.

The latter holds “Putumayo and Yaguas, areas that according to Devida have reduced the 2,000 hectares under cultivation. I don’t believe it,” he said.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), that commissioned the report, also lists Peru as the world’s second largest cocaine producer.

Soberón added another element that discredits the conclusions of the Devida report: the government’s behaviour.

“There is no air interdiction in the Amazonian trapezoid, the non-lethal interdiction agreement with the United States will be operational in 2025. On the other hand, there are complaints against the anti-drug police in Loreto, the department where Putumayo and Yaguas are located, for their links with Brazilian mafias,” he explained.

He believes there was an attempt to whitewash “a government that is completely isolated”, referring to the administration led since December 2022 by interim president Dina Boluarte, with minimal levels of approval and questioned over a series of democratic setbacks.

Soberón, director of Devida in 2011-2012 and 2021-2022, has constantly warned that the government, at different levels, has not incorporated the indigenous agenda in its policies against illegalities in their ancestral areas.

This, he said, despite the growing pressure on their peoples and lands from “the largest illegal extractive economies in the world: drug trafficking, logging and gold mining,” the main causes of deforestation, loss of biodiversity and territorial dispossession.

Soberón argued that, given the magnitude of cocaine trafficking in the world, major trafficking groups need coca crop reserves, and Peruvian territory is fit for it. He deplored the minimal strategic vision among political, economic, commercial and social players in the Amazon.

Based on previous research, he says that the Cauca-Nariño bridge in southern Colombia, Putumayo in Peru, and parts of Brazil, form the Amazonian trapezoid: a fluid transit area not only for cocaine, but also for arms, supplies and gold.

Hence the great flow of cocaine in the area, for trafficking and distribution to the United States and other markets, which makes the jungle-like indigenous territories of the Peruvian Amazon attractive for coca crops and cocaine laboratories.

Soberón stresses it is possible to reconcile anti-drug policy with the protection of the Amazon, for example by promoting the citizen social pacts that he himself developed as a pilot project during his term in office.

It is a matter, he said, of turning the social players, such as the indigenous peoples, into decision-makers. But this requires a clear political will, which is not seen in the current Devida administration.

Mariano Isacama (left), a Kakataibo indigenous leader who disappeared and was murdered after allegedly receiving threats from people linked to drug traffickers. Next to him, the president of the indigenous organisation Orau, Magno López. Credit: Courtesy of Marcelo Odicio

“We will not stand idly by”

Odicio, the president of Fenacoka, knows that the increased presence of invaders in their territories is aimed at planting pasture and coca leaf, an activity that destroys their forests. They have even installed maceration ponds near the communities.

When invaders arrive, they cut down the trees, burn them, raise cattle, take possession of the land and then demand the right to title, he explained. “After the anti-forestry law, they feel strong and say they have a right to the land, when it is not the case,” he said.

He refers to the reform of the Forestry and Wildlife Act No. 29763, in force since December 2023, which further weakens the security of indigenous peoples over their land rights and opens the door to legal and illegal extractive activities.

The leader, who has a wife and two young children, knows that the role of defender exposes him. “We are the ones who pay the consequences, we are visible to criminals, we are branded as informers, but I will continue to defend our rights. Along with the indigenous guard we will ensure that the autonomy of our territory is respected,” he stressed.

In the native community of Puerto Nuevo there are 200 Kakataibo families, with 500 more in Sinchi Roca. They live from the sustainable use of their forest resources, who are at risk from illegal activities. “We just want to live in peace, but we will defend ourselves because we cannot stand idly by if they do not respect our autonomy”, he said.

“No Narco-state, No Keiko!” was the chant repeated endlessly by protesters during the massive May 31 demonstrations in Lima and many other cities in Peru against the possible triumph of presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori. Credit: Courtesy of La República

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Jun 3 2016 (IPS)

Thousands of Peruvians took to the streets of Lima and other cities to protest the likely triumph in the Sunday Jun. 5 runoff election of Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and crimes against humanity.

If Keiko Fujimori wins, as indicated by the polls, it will be the fourth time a Fujimori is elected president.

Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) spent two full terms in office and his third term was cut short (he served less than one year) due to a corruption scandal revolving around his security chief Vladimiro Montesinos. His administration was marked by human rights violations and a self-coup in which he dissolved Congress, suspended civil liberties and established government by decree. “A triumph by Keiko Fujimori represents for Peruvian democracy, on a symbolic level, the exercise of shameful masochism on the part of those who already suffered the crimes and horror of her father’s government…Her election would amount to support for a way of governing that violated all the principles of democracy.” – Julio Arbizu

On May 31 and two previous occasions, enormous crowds of demonstrators took to the streets in Lima and other major cities to protest the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori, in protests similar to those she faced as first lady – a position she held informally after her parents divorced – during the campaign in which her father was reelected to a third term, in 2000.

Keiko Fujimori, 41, is facing off with banker Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, 77, who served as prime minister and economy minister in the government of Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006). They are both running for president for a second time: in 2011 she came in second and he came in third in the elections won by Ollanta Humala.

In the last two opinion polls, Fujimori was slightly ahead of Kuczynski, which could change due to the growing denunciations of corruption and other irregularities against the candidate for the right-wing Fuerza Popular, which groups the supporters of 77-year-old Alberto Fujimori, who has been in a cell in a national police station on the east side of Lima since 2007.

Since last year, Keiko Fujimori has been seeking to project an image of herself as having nothing to do with the authoritarian practices of her father, in a strategy that has included populist promises aimed at neutralising the anti-Fujimorista vote that led to her defeat in 2011.

But during the campaign that got underway in January, the candidate has faced a growing number of accusations of shady financing, manipulation of the media, false claims about her political opponents, and other practices that put people in mind of the way her father did things.

“Those of us who fought the authoritarianism and corruption of the government of Alberto Fujimori believe that a victory by his daughter Keiko Fujimori would represent a setback to democracy,” said Salomón Lerner, President Humala’s former prime minister.

“Keiko Fujimori, who at the start of her election campaign criticised the excesses of her father, was repeating his practices by the last stage of the campaign. And one demonstration of what I’m saying is the appearance of shady figures, with dubious reputations, who worked with Alberto Fujimori,” Lerner told IPS.

According to Peru’s national elections office, Fujimori has reported more than three million dollars in income, compared to the centre-right Kuczynski’s 2.2 million.

The May 31 protest in Lima against presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, the daughter and heir to Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year sentence for crimes against humanity and corruption. Credit: Courtesy of La República

Keiko Fujimori’s main campaign funders include former officials from her father’s regime or people otherwise close to him, some of whom are implicated in the current investigation of money laundering in her 2011 campaign.

Drug trafficking, more than just a shadow

In 2013, the U.S. government accused businessman Luis Calle, who helped finance Keiko Fujimori’s campaign in 2011, of being an international drug kingpin and laundering money.

And in 2014, Peru’s special prosecutor for money laundering cases, Julia Príncipe, sought to lift the parliamentary immunity of Fujimorista lawmaker Joaquín Ramírez, alleging a major discrepancy between his reported income and his 7.1 million dollars in assets.

But the following year, Keiko Fujimori made him secretary general of Fuerza Popular and later threw all her support behind him even after the public prosecutor’s office launched an investigation of him for alleged money laundering.

And she ratified Ramírez in his post after the U.S. Spanish-language television network Univisión and the investigative journalism programme Cuarto Poder, in Lima, revealed in a joint televised news report that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was investigating him.

An undercover informant for the DEA, Jesús Vásquez, said he had recorded Ramírez saying Keiko Fujimori gave him 15 million dollars in alleged drug money to launder for the 2011 election campaign.

Although Fujimori dismissed the reports as false, Ramírez was forced to temporarily step down as the leader of Fuerza Popular, after Peruvian authorities announced a trip to the United States to interview Vásquez.

When it looked like the scandal was winding down, the TV programme “Las cosas como son” aired a recording in which Vásquez apparently said he had lied about what Ramírez said. Shortly afterwards the producer of the programme, Mayra Albán, said the recording had been doctored, and that it had come from the head of Fujimori’s campaign, José Chlimper.

It was an operation by the Fujimori camp to discredit the DEA informant, whose accusations reminded analysts and opposition politicians of Keiko Fujimori and her father: during the latter’s government, drug trafficking was one of the biggest sources of corruption, as the justice system proved.

Former anti-corruption prosecutor Julio Arbizu said “a triumph by Keiko Fujimori represents for Peruvian democracy, on a symbolic level, the exercise of shameful masochism on the part of those who already suffered the crimes and horror of her father’s government.”

“Her election would amount to support for a way of governing that violated all the principles of democracy,” added Arbizu, who headed the fight against corruption in the country from 2011 to 2014.

“But as a more in-depth consequence, a victory by Fujimorismo would mean the country would be governed by a criminal organisation (I believe Fujimorismo has always been one), which this time around has a strong coating of formality, but which has given us enough reasons to believe that it has serious ties to the drug trade and money laundering,” he added.

Keiko Fujimori, with Joaquín Ramírez, who has temporarily been suspended as secretary general of her party, Fuerza Popular, because of accusations of drug trade-related activities, although the candidate has confirmed her confidence in him. Credit: Courtesy of La República

Arbizu played a decisive role in the extradition of former president Fujimori, when he took refuge in Chile, in 2007, after he tried to step down as president, while in Asia, in late 2000 and was impeached by Congress for “moral incapacity.”

Congresswoman Rosa Mavila presided over an investigative commission on the links between drug trafficking and politics, which issued a report that mentioned ties with Fujimorismo.

“At the end of Fujimori’s government, when Keiko Fujimori was first lady, she asked her father to pardon the Martínez sisters, who were in prison at the time on charges of drug trafficking,” Mavila, who belongs to a centre-left alliance, told IPS.

Fujimori freed them, and when his daughter was running for Congress in 2006, “the Martínez sisters contributed to her campaign. And this isn’t the only case,” said Mavila.

“During the Fujimori administration, the drug trade had a powerful influence,” she stated.

As an example, she cited the case of drug trafficker Fernando Zevallos, who was acquitted four times during that period, but was sentenced to 20 years in prison once Toledo became president.

“Rather than trying to ward off any doubt, Keiko Fujimori has defended people accused of money laundering, as in the case of Congressman Joaquín Ramírez,” said Mavila, who pointed out that the Fujimorista leader had taken refuge in his parliamentary immunity to escape investigation.

“Immunity is not impunity. The Fujimoristas should understand that,” the legislator said.

In the May 31 march against Keiko Fujimori, the most frequently intoned chant was against the creation of a “narco state”, if the daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori is elected Sunday.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Joaquín Roy
SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, Mexico, Nov 1 2014 (IPS)

Mexico can charm, irritate, wound, inspire and confuse the casual visitor as well as the informed researcher. But no one is ever left indifferent by it. Mexico leaves an indelible mark.

To understand it properly, one has to assume that there is not one Mexico, but many. This is partly what made Lesley Byrd Simpson’s book ‘Many Mexicos’ a famous bestseller in the 1960s; it is still required reading for travellers and academics alike.

Joaquín Roy

One Mexico appears to be caught in a time warp. Another is cruelly open to nearly all the evils and tragedies of the present age.

One lives in the past, while the other is not sure of its place in the future. One exudes peace and happiness. Another is systematically killing itself. One is generous, the other takes delight in robbery and corruption.

All the versions of Mexico have been exposed to view by the tragedy of the disappearance and probable massacre in late September of more than 40 young rural schoolteachers in the state of Guerrero.

A diabolical combination of hunger and poverty with private and government corruption, linked with drug trafficking, has contributed to this atrocity. The education profession which could have provided a modest corrective to Mexico’s endemic inequality – and that of the rest of Latin America, the world’s most unequal region – has instead become its victim. “One Mexico appears to be caught in a time warp. Another is cruelly open to nearly all the evils and tragedies of the present age. One lives in the past, while the other is not sure of its place in the future. One exudes peace and happiness. Another is systematically killing itself”

After turning a blind eye to countless past complaints, the crimes of illegal detention, kidnapping and extortion have now blown up in the face of three layers of government (municipal, state and federal). The authorities expected that the idyllic Mexico would once again cover up the reality of the vestiges of what Mario Vargas Llosa aptly called “the perfect dictatorship” – now the title of a blockbuster movie.

A remnant of the mirage of “the end of history” proposed by Francis Fukuyama, Mexico today is a stubborn exemplar of the endurance of the apparently eternal Mexico that refuses to disappear.

The services rendered by the populist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the United States, by maintaining domestic order in a country that might potentially develop into a second Cuba of over 100 million people, have achieved its reinstatement after surviving two six-year terms of the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

The economic reforms instituted by the new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who affects a modern image with Kennedy-esque overtones, appear to be castles in the air. A new airport for the capital city, a high-speed rail network and a spectacular proposal for private participation in exploiting energy sources are to perform the miracle of launching Mexico definitively into modernity and progress.

The rough underside of Mexico has reminded the president that things are not so easy. Insisting on the validity of all the national myths does not appear to be sufficient to erase the serious shortcomings of one of the few countries in the world with a character and a solid history of its own. 

Mexico vies with Brazil for the leadership of Latin America, and rivals a handful of nations around the world in terms of international presence. It boasts remarkable banking activity which acts as a magnet for investments and the development of technology parks.

Its streets and highways are jammed with traffic, including a surprising number of high-end cars. But most of its citizens have no alternative but to walk or take crowded buses to get to work, a process that takes up a scandalous amount of their time in return for insulting wages.

However, Mexicans seem to be more optimistic than citizens of many other countries in the rest of the world, displaying a strong sense of loyalty on national holidays, when they wave enormous flags and even hoist them above the crosses on the tops of churches.

It is repeatedly said that Mexico is eternal. The Olmecs, Aztecs and Mayas are claimed as part of the nation. A decorous veil is drawn over the colonial and imperial periods, but there is generous and serious recognition of the Spanish contribution after President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) welcomed Spanish exiles to the country.

Mexico is a varied civic community modelled on inclusiveness and individual decision-making, not based on ethnicity, blood ties or religion. Mexico is the future, without renouncing the heritage of the past.

But undying loyalty reaps an unacceptably meagre reward. Recently, the Mexican government set the daily minimum wage at about five dollars. Across the border, U.S. President Barack Obama announced an hourly minimum wage of 14 dollars.

No wonder, then, that Mexicans vote with their feet and are drawn inexorably to the magnet of the United States. With more than 40 million Mexicans living north of the Rio Grande, the unity of the body politic is an illusion.

If this nation depends on the labours of rural schoolteachers of indigenous extraction being paid barely subsistence wages, who are discriminated against, forcibly disappeared and massacred, the project of Peña Nieto and the new PRI is Utopian. Many Mexicos will continue to coexist side by side. For how long? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Drug transactions are usually conducted using the online peer-to-peer currency bitcoin, which remains in escrow until it is transferred to the seller after the product is delivered. Credit: BTC keychain/cc by 2.0

By Chau Ngo
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2014 (IPS)

In its two years of operation, the online marketplace Silk Road raked in 1.2 billion dollars in revenue and amassed an estimated 200,000 registered users – a success story that would be any start-up’s dream.

But the site was shut down by the FBI last October amid charges that it was essentially the Amazon.com of illegal drugs, shedding light on the increasing sophistication of a cyber drug trade that offers both buyers and dealers high-tech anonymity.“The new markets that have replaced Silk Road can now encrypt all communications and use advanced techniques to launder the bitcoins used in transactions." -- Prof. David Hetu

In its World Drug Report 2014 released last week, the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) warns that illicit online drug sales will pose unique challenges for law enforcement.

“The online marketplace for illicit drugs is becoming larger and more brazen,” it said. “If the past trend continues, it has the potential to become a popular mode of trafficking in controlled substances in years to come.”

The growth of online drug dealing has gone hand in hand with advancements in technology. The UNODC’s review of global drug seizure data shows that cannabis seizures obtained through the postal service rose 300 percent in the decade from 2000 to 2011.

The majority of the reported seizures came from Europe and the Americas, with high-quality drugs and new psychoactive substances, according to the report.

Governments’ efforts to curb this crime brought down a number of networks last year, with Silk Road being the most prominent case so far. The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested the website’s owner, Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old physics graduate, and seized bitcoins worth 33.6 million dollars at the time of the capture.

Silk Road was for some time the most sophisticated and extensive marketplace on the Internet, where dealers sell illegal goods and services, including illicit drugs of almost every variety, the FBI said.

So far the value of cyberspace drug trafficking is still marginal in comparison with the overall drug trade, which is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to David Hetu, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Montreal, who specialises in cybercrime. But the upward trend is troubling.

“We are seeing an exponential growth of virtual drug markets,” he told IPS. “What we have seen is a lot of markets with a heavy focus on drugs and prescription drugs.”  

There are some 200,000 drug-related deaths worldwide every year, and 39 million people had drug disorders or dependence in 2012, according to the U.N. Despite a stabilisation of drug use around the world, illicit opium production still rose to a record level last year, with Afghanistan continuing to be the world’s largest producer.

Taking advantage of high tech

Online drug trading has existed since the early days of the Internet. However, its sophistication has only accelerated recently, experts say. Technology has enabled online dealers to offer goods and services, and make transactions anonymously.

“Two distinct technologies that have emerged in the past decade – anonymous networks such as Tor, and pseudonymous payments systems such as Bitcoin – have made it possible to create online anonymous markets which provide reasonably good anonymity guarantees,” Nicolas Christin, assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told IPS.

“This is the most important development in online drug dealing in the past three years.”

In his research paper “Traveling the ‘Silk Road’: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace,” Christin noted that the top three items for sale on this website were “weed”, “drugs” and “prescriptions”.

Introduced in 2009 as a virtual currency, the bitcoin has no physical existence. Operating on an electronic system built on the peer-to-peer network where users are directly connected instead of going through the central servers in the traditional system, transactions in bitcoins are almost untraceable and anonymous.

Despite not being recognised by any central bank or government, the bitcoin is widely seen as not being illegal. People can buy anything from from pizzas to houses with bitcoins, as long as the sellers accept it.

Tor, or The Onion Router, is software that enables data to transmit globally almost untraceably. It allows users to connect to another location in the network while keeping their Internet Protocol address invisible – known as the Dark Net.

Because of the technical issues, buying drugs online is more complicated than in the streets, said David Hetu. However, it is not too difficult for those who seek to circumvent law enforcement. All that a buyer needs to do is to buy bitcoins online, install Tor, choose to buy drugs from the listings and have it delivered at home through the postal service.

For dealers, drug trafficking has become easier with technology. After Road Silk was taken down by the FBI last year, new markets emerged just within days.

“The new markets that have replaced Silk Road can now encrypt all communications and use advanced techniques to launder the bitcoins used in transactions,” Hetu said.

“This makes it much more difficult for law enforcement to trace buyers and vendors.”

International cooperation

There is no reliable data on how many people are buying drugs online, but the types of drugs being sold are multiplying, according to the UNODC.

Before its shutdown, Silk Road was the marketplace for a vast majority of illegal drugs, with nearly 13,000 listings of controlled drugs, the FBI said. Despite the anonymity of transactions, the FBI said dealers might be located in more than 10 countries, stretching from North America to Europe.

Cyberspace drug dealing is particularly challenging, as offenders can easily and quickly adapt their practices to avoid risks posed by law enforcement, Thomas Holt, an assistant professor at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice, told IPS.

Holt, whose research focuses on cybercrime and identity theft, said that law enforcement agencies need to engage in undercover operations to understand the practices of buyers and sellers within the market.

“International cooperation is essential to these efforts as the buyers and sellers may be half a world away from one another,” he said.

“Incorporating postal inspectors, customs agents, and other agencies is vital to ensure that points in the supply chain could be more effectively cut off and make it more difficult for buyers to obtain products.”

Photographs of Joaquín Guzmán, alias "El Chapo", on Interpol's web page.

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 25 2014 (IPS)

The arrest of the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, will not affect drug trafficking in Mexico, but it presents an opportunity to change the country’s drug policy, experts told IPS.

The organisational hierarchy of the Sinaloa cartel “reflects the weakness of the Mexican state,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, head of the Instituto de Acción Ciudadana para la Justicia y la Democracia (Institute for Citizen Action for Justice and Democracy), an NGO.

Guzmán, the world’s most wanted drug trafficker until his capture in the early hours of Saturday Feb. 22, had his centre of operations in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa.

In Buscaglia’s view, the two previous governments of the rightwing National Action Party (PAN) “only dismantled networked power groups, without replacing them” with an adequate state presence.

To achieve that, it is necessary to “audit the assets” of the business and political network that allowed the expansion of the Sinaloa cartel in the first place, Buscaglia said.

The Sinaloa cartel is the most powerful in Mexico, and competes with at least seven other trafficking organisations for the production, transport and smuggling of illegal drugs to the lucrative U.S. market.

Mexican marines arrested the 56-year-old Guzmán in an apartment building in the tourist port city of Mazatlán, thanks to information shared by the U.S. Drug Enforcemant Administration (DEA).

Guzmán had been captured previously in Guatemala in 1993, but after his extradition and incarceration in a high-security prison in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, he escaped in January 2001, during the government of president Vicente Fox (2000-2006).

Since then Guzmán, with the support of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Juan José “El Azul” Esparragoza, built a narco-empire with a presence in 58 countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to Buscaglia and other experts.

Its transnational links provide the organisation with supplies for manufacturing drugs, arms-buying and money-laundering facilities, and the means to create production, storage and distribution centres.

Guzmán’s re-arrest “was foreseeable, because (drug bosses) become targets to show that the rule of law exists in Mexico,” said Javier Oliva, an expert on national security and chair of a department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Faculty of Political Sciences.

Under former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) “there were rivalries in the cabinet. Now cohesiveness is much greater and there is (policy) continuity, because the armed forces are still on the front lines of the drug war,” Oliva said.

When President Enrique Peña Nieto, of the traditional Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) took office in December 2012, he promised a new approach to security, to distance himself from the legacy of Calderón, whose war on drugs left over 100,000 dead.

The difference has been one of nuances only, because Peña Nieto has kept the military in the forefront of the war against the cartels and the hunt for their leaders.

In July 2013, government forces apprehended Miguel Ángel Treviño “El Z-40”, one of the leaders of Los Zetas, a cartel founded in the early 2000s by former members of Mexican army special forces.

Violence abated a little. In 2013 a total of 34,648 homicides were reported, according to Mexico’s National System of Public Security, compared to 38,052 violent deaths in 2012.

Guzmán may be extradited to the United States, in order to avoid scandals such as his escape in 2001. The U.S. government offered five million dollars for his capture and he faces charges there for drug trafficking and money laundering.

Guzmán was apprehended only two days after the North American Leaders’ Summit, known as the “Three Amigos Summit,” between Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada, U.S. President Barack Obama and Peña Nieto in the Mexican city of Toluca, marking the 20th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“When the authoritarian state was dismantled, it created a vacuum in state power. This meant that organised crime acquired more power. Mexican criminal groups benefited from those vacuums,” Buscaglia said.

Buscaglia, the author of the book “Vacíos de poder en México” (Power Vacuums in Mexico), said “this transition is continuing and those vacuums remain unfilled. If the vacuums were filled, it would be harder for characters like Guzmán to emerge.”

In his view, the main challenge is to regulate drug production and eliminate incentives for the manufacture of narcotics, in an unbalanced situation: the over-regulated U.S. market, and the poorly regulated Mexican one.

“The solution is better regulation of the markets. If you remove the opportunity to make money, you eliminate the influence of the criminal groups,” he said, advocating decriminalisation of substances like marijuana.

Since the military war on drugs was launched in 2006, the armed forces have killed several drug trafficking leaders: Arturo Beltrán Leyva, in 2009, Ignacio Coronel, a person close to Guzmán, in 2010, and Antonio Cárdenas Guillén of the Gulf cartel, also in 2010.

Guzmán appeared on the U.S. Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires between 2009 and 2012, with a net worth of about three billion dollars.

According to Oliva, his recapture provides “an opportunity for prevention of drug use, and for raising awareness that those who go in for this activity end badly, either dead or in detention.”

The web site Historias del Narco (Drug Stories) speculates that Dámaso López Jr., nicknamed “El Mini Lic,” who is Guzmán’s godson, might take his place. Born in Sinaloa, and regarded by the U.S. Department of Justice as Guzmán’s “right hand,” he heads a youth gang known on social networks as “Los Ántrax”.

After Guzmán’s arrest, Phil Jordan, a former intelligence director for the DEA in El Paso, Texas, on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, expressed surprise, because according to him Guzmán had financed Peña Nieto’s election campaign.

The statement he made on the U.S. Univision television network implicated the DEA as having knowledge of alleged links between organised crime and leading Mexican politicians.

The contributions “are documented for past campaigns of the PRI. El Chapo, (Rafael) Caro (Quintero, of the disbanded Guadalajara cartel), all of them gave money to whoever was running for president. I don’t have the papers but there are intelligence reports which indicate that El Chapo’s cartel was very involved in politics,” he said.

Why, then, did the government of Peña Nieto arrest him? “Something bad happened between the PRI and El Chapo Guzmán,” he speculated. And he did not rule out that the drug trafficker may have negotiated his capture.

Neither government has yet responded officially to Jordan’s statements.

Members of self-defence groups are still patrolling the town of Nueva Italia in the region of Tierra Caliente in Michoacán, ignoring the Mexican government’s call for them to lay down their weapons. Credit: Félix Márquez/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jan 16 2014 (IPS)

“The army decided to open fire on the people,” Estanislao Beltrán, a spokesman for the self-defence forces of Michoacán, said in a radio interview after the government’s attempt to disarm the vigilante groups in the state of Mexico, in which at least two people were killed.

The confirmed casualties were Rodrigo Benítez Pérez, 25, and Mario Pérez, 56, both day labourers from the town of Antúnez. They were not armed.

Some sources say four people were killed when the military attempted to disarm the self-defence group on Monday Jan. 13. But only these two deaths have been confirmed.

Michoacán is caught up in something like a civil war for which no solution is in sight. In February 2013, people from several towns in a region known as Tierra Caliente took up arms to defend themselves from the Knights Templar drug cartel.

Tierra Caliente is a farming region that has become the world’s largest avocado-producing area in the world. It also has mines, as well as the Pacific Ocean port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico’s third-most important.

The Knights Templar are a breakaway faction of another cartel, La Familia, that emerged during the government of former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), initially claiming to “protect” the people of Michoacán from the notoriously brutal Zetas drug cartel.

But the new cartel soon forgot that aim, and began to kidnap and extort businesspersons, ranchers and farmers. They were so powerful that not even the executives and managers of transnational companies like Mexico’s potato chip maker Sabritas, a subsidiary of U.S. food giant PepsiCo, were safe from their attacks and extortion.

The situation hit a low point when they began to commit sexual abuse.

“They would show up at your house and say: ‘I really like your woman, I’ll bring her back soon’,” said Dr. José Manuel Mireles, the founder and leader of the self-defence group, in an interview with the independent agency SubVersiones.

Mireles is convalescing in Mexico City, after the small plane in which he was flying home to his town, after a meeting with federal authorities, crashed on Jan. 4. The cause of the crash has not been clarified.

In the last few months, with the green light from the federal authorities according to the self-defence force’s leaders, the group gradually gained control of the towns in Tierra Caliente. And little by little, they hemmed in Apatzingán, a city of 100,000 people that is the main stronghold of the Knights Templar.

The cartel, cornered, began to set fire to town halls and buses around the region. But instead of moving to dismantle the cartel, the government of Enrique Peña Nieto sent in the army to disarm the self-defence groups, which it had allowed to grow for months.

The government’s argument is that they are illegal groups, because in Mexico civilians are not allowed to carry guns of a larger calibre than nine mm.

The government has leaked information about a possible link between the self-defence groups and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which splintered from the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

According to the federal government, the Jalisco New Generation cartel has been trying to take control of the production and trafficking routes for synthetic drugs in Michoacán.

The leaders of the self-defence forces deny any ties to criminal groups, and feel betrayed by the federal government, which used to back them.

“The government has changed its tune,” Alejandra Guillén, a reporter who has closely followed the phenomenon of the self-defence groups in indigenous areas of Michoacán, told IPS. “It used to clearly support them, and would accompany them. But something happened; now it is sending in the military to disarm them and kill civilians.”

Experts in security like Martín Barrón, a researcher at the National Institute of Penal Sciences, say that what is happening in the state is the result of a misguided strategy applied by the Calderón administration: “governing through fear.”

Interior minister Miguel Osorio acknowledged that the current situation in Michoacán is a consequence of a decade in which violence incubated.

Michoacán, in the southwest, is one of Mexico’s most lawless states, and decades ago the population learned to live with – and in many cases, live off – the drug trade.

“None of the categories of analysis help us understand Michoacán,” said Guillén. “There are no good or bad guys, just a society very closely linked to the phenomenon of the drug trade, which it didn’t see as a bad thing until the turf wars began. We can’t forget that the region has been a drug production area for many years.

“And another important thing is that it’s not just a question of taking up arms. They have a social base,” she added.

One of the founders of the Knights Templar, Servando Gómez, was a teacher in a primary school in the Michoacán town of Arteaga, where until 2009 he received his paycheck as a schoolteacher.

And until early 2013, when he swapped his stethoscope for an assault rifle, Mireles attended patients in the small public hospital in Tepalcatepec.

In mid-2009, the druglord Gómez, known as La Tuta, phoned a radio programme to call for a pact with then President Felipe Calderón, saying his organisation would be prepared to disappear if the authorities guaranteed security in his territory and defended them from rival cartels.

“We are a necessary evil,” he said. “Please understand that the day I die they will put someone else in my place, and someone else will replace him, and so on; this will never end.”

Calderón rejected the proposal, and in response sent the security forces into the state, with poor results, and with dozens of police and soldiers ambushed and killed.

The tension in Michoacán has spread to neighbouring states like Colima, Querétaro and Guerrero, which have their own self-defence forces. There are a total of 36 of these vigilante groups, in eight of Mexico’s 31 states.

In the past few days, people in the Tierra Caliente region have seen public services restricted, supplies reduced, roads cut off, city government buildings set on fire, and civilians killed by the army.

The federal government launched a special operation in Michoacán and said it would not allow the self-defence forces to continue to act.

The self-defence groups, meanwhile, say they won’t hand over their weapons unless the leaders of the Knights Templar are arrested or eliminated. They say that if they lay down their arms, the drug traffickers will kill them.

“We are not going to put down our weapons or sit down to negotiate, until the criminal leaders are detained,” Beltrán told listeners of the Radio Nacional station.

Women and children from the village where the Esparza family was murdered by soldiers in Mexico's "drug war" demand justice outside the schoolhouse.Mónica González /IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Following the release of a major draft report on drug policy in the Americas, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, called for the beginning of debate aimed at reforming those policies throughout the region.

“Delivering this report today,” Insulza said Wednesday, “we are encouraged by the sincere aspiration, which I now have the privilege of presenting to the entire hemisphere, that this is not a conclusion but only the beginning of a long-awaited discussion.”"A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways.” -- John Walsh of WOLA

The draft report was shared with the 35 member countries of the OAS and is now scheduled to be discussed in depth at the upcoming organisation’s general assembly, on Jun. 4 in Guatemala.

The call for a new debate comes in light of a strengthened resolve on the issue throughout the region. This relates to the violence associated with drug trafficking as seen along the U.S.- Mexico border, as well as an increased prevalence of drug use and growing demand for health care services to treat addictions.

While acknowledging shortcomings in the implementation of current policies, some countries are continuing to defend the overall approach, and are encouraging a plan of action adopted by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) branch of the Washington-based OAS. This approach calls for the continued concentration of efforts to reduce both supply and demand, as well as measures in line with United Nations conventions on drug law.

The new OAS discussion will inevitably be energised by the recent surprise legalisation of marijuana in two U.S. states in November.

“A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways,” John Walsh, a senior associate with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“The report points to the need for flexibility to pursue options that may imply national and international reforms, including legal and regulated cannabis markets. And it emphasises that this more open debate is really just now beginning.”

Many of the region’s leaders have expressed frustration with the limits and exorbitant costs of current policies and their desire for a fuller and more creative debate.

But according to Walsh, who participated in writing the OAS report, there is a lot of scepticism over whether the OAS will be up to the task, especially given U.S. domination of the issue. But he also emphasises that the new report represents a good first step in the direction of a more constructive and nuanced debate.

“Drug policy is an international issue as well as a domestic issue and it can be hard to separate them, especially when you’re talking about drugs trafficking across borders – if it’s an issue in Colorado, chances are it is related to the issue in Mexico,” Walsh, who released a paper on this issue earlier this week, told IPS.

“In the case of cannabis in particular, the U.S. has been the chief advocate for international drug conventions that place strict controls on cannabis. However, as the U.S. begins to revisit and alter its cannabis laws, this will certainly have an effect on how the drug conventions are seen within the U.S. – and, and in turn, in Latin America, because all countries in the Americas are signatories of the same treaties.”

The OAS draft report even explores the potential creation of legal and regulated markets that would reflect these changes taking place in the United States.

“Changing U.S. public opinion towards cannabis is being reflected in changes in state policy, which has already placed the U.S. at odds with the drug conventions,” Walsh notes. “And while some of the Latin American states might be feeling a bit puzzled by the U.S.’s new approach to drug policy, others are seeing an opportunity to have similar proposals.”

Yet significant differences remain in public attitudes on this issue outside the United States. Walsh suggests that while public opinion has led government policy in this county, governments would need to lead public opinion towards legalisation in many Latin American countries.

Cannabis disconnect

Following the November elections here, a looming disconnect has opened up between where the United States seems to be going on cannabis policy and how the U.S. is asking other countries in the region to act. This is most evident in the case of Mexico, with Washington continuing to push the Mexican government to use its security institutions to forcefully crack down on the illicit cross-border drug trade.

For the moment, it appears unlikely that this policy will change. Yet some analysts say they are already seeing a fundamental shift in this dynamic, with Latin American governments taking the lead for the first time, in trying to define drug policies in the region.

Depending on how it proceeds at the meeting on Jun. 4, the new OAS report could be a central component of this shift. Beyond the cannabis issue, for instance, the OAS report offers a range of proposals and alternatives to be considered which, if adopted, would dramatically change the way drug policies are implemented.

This is happening after years in which the U.S. government was able to largely dictate such policy. Very recently, however, Latin American countries have been examining the drugs problems they’re dealing with on an individual level – and to decide on the most appropriate policy responses.

“Most of the considerations of new cannabis policy involve examining the potential to separate the cannabis market from the wider black market for illicit drugs,” Colletta Youngers, a long-time Latin American drugs expert with WOLA, told IPS.

“This is both to protect the people who want to obtain cannabis from having to go into criminal markets, and also to the extent that cannabis is a big part of illicit drug revenues that are for now entirely in criminal hands and to put those revenues into the hands and control of the state.”

Still, she admits that for the time being the issue of legal, regulated cannabis markets is a priority for some U.S. states, but not yet for the national government. But Youngers also points to countries such as Uruguay – where such a law is currently pending – and others that are currently exploring such issues.

UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov on a visit to the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 10 2013 (IPS)

Tuchinha was once a drug lord in Rio de Janeiro’s Mangueira favela. But today he is helping youngsters in this Brazilian city turn their lives around and leave behind crime, prison and the likelihood of an early death.

Franciso Paulo Testas Monteiro, better known as Tuchinha, climbed to the heights of the criminal world. Because he could read and write – he went to school through the fifth grade – and was good with numbers, he was put in charge of the accounts of one of Rio de Janeiro’s main criminal bands.

He became an almost mythical figure in the world of organised crime as the drug baron of Morro da Mangueira, a violent shantytown where drug traffickers held sway. Half of his life – 25 years – was dedicated to the drug trade.

He had plenty of ready cash, women and other perks. But in his ascent, he paid a high price. He spent a total of 21 years in prison, serving two different sentences, and both he and his family lived with death threats.

Today, at 49, he says he is repentant. “I grew up in Mangueira, I was a leader,” he told IPS. “I had money, women, jewels, but I didn’t have freedom. When I ventured outside my neighbourhood, I had to hide, or else I had to actually leave Rio. If I had had an opportunity to do so, I would have changed my life earlier.”

It was Aug. 5, 2011 when he left drug trafficking behind forever, after he was invited by the local NGO AfroReggae to give workshops to help young people leave behind a life of crime.

“I did many bad things, and gave orders for many others to be committed,” he said. “I paid heavily for it, with my freedom. Today my role is to rescue those who want to leave crime behind, and I am the living proof that a life lived in peace is worth it.”

Tuchinha visits prisons to talk to young inmates, and he helps mediate in conflicts in violent neighbourhoods.

“We want to give the same opportunity I had to people who want to get back on track, abandon crime, and live in peace with their families. Many of them feel hopeless, but I tell them there is hope.”

The former drug boss is an advocate of amnesties for prisoners, so they can have a chance to begin a new life.

He is confident that he will be able to finish school, and hopes to live in a safer city, for the sake of his children.

Tuchinha works to convince young drug dealers and traffickers to join AfroReggae’s “employability” programme. Created in 2008, the programme has so far managed to find jobs for more than 3,100 people.

Daniela Pereira da Silva, 35, spent three years in prison and is now one of the programme coordinators.

“I form part of the statistics on women, which show that most women in prison are there because they had a boyfriend or husband who was a drug trafficker,” she told IPS.

The aim of the programme, she said, is to help ex-convicts enter the labour market. “Demand has been strong, and we’re also open to residents of communities where drug trafficking groups operate, and to relatives of ex-convicts, to boost family incomes and keep them from falling back into crime,” she said.

Tuchinha and Silva formed part of the group of former drug traffickers supported by AfroReggae who met with the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Yury Fedotov, on his first official visit to Brazil, May 7-9.

The meeting, which was attended by IPS, took place in AfroReggae’s main offices in the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela or shantytown, situated behind the world-famous Ipanema beach.

Pavão-Pavãozinho is one of the favelas “pacified” by the authorities under Rio’s strategy of regaining state control over areas ruled by armed drug gangs, by means of a heavy, permanent police presence combined with increased spending in the areas of health, education, sports and income-generating activities.

Fedotov visited the city to learn first-hand about the social and public security programmes underway in Rio’s favelas. “I came to Brazil to see how successful experiences of combating crime in Rio de Janeiro could be adapted to other places with similar security issues,” he said.

He added that the favela pacification project was apparently working, and said it was the first time he had seen anything like it and he was “very impressed”

“Such initiatives are enormously instructive for UNODC as they can provide a roadmap on how to reintegrate ex-traffickers in an effective and creative way as part of overall crime prevention interventions,” he said.

The Russian diplomat said he could see the changes since he visited Rio 10 years ago. He also expressed his admiration for the people who had the courage to leave behind a life of crime.

Mangueira and Pavão-Pavãozinho are two of the 32 favelas in Rio de Janeiro pacified by the police. The authorities’ goal is to set up a total of 40 police pacification units (UPPs) in the city’s poor neighbourhoods by 2014.

At least one million of the six million people in Rio proper (Greater Rio has a population of 11 million) live in some 750 favelas, a number of which are still ruled by drug gangs.

“Our policy used to be focused on repression, which generated more conflicts and deaths,” the commander of the local UPP, Major Felipe Magalhães dos Reis, said at the meeting in Pavão-Pavãozinho. “The police didn’t tackle the causes of violence, but its effects. Meanwhile, criminals had increasingly powerful weapons.”

The cost of the “war on drugs” was high in terms of loss of life, he acknowledged.

The police say more than 2,000 police were killed between 1991 and 2008, another 10,000 people died in confrontations with the security forces, and 170,000 guns were seized.

“There was no solution in sight, until the idea of creating the UPPs emerged,” Magalhães dos Reis said.

“Social inclusion and community development are essential components in preventing crime,” Fedotov said, adding that the experience could be adapted to other countries, especially the elements of social integration, pacification and alternative means of life.

Brazil is a transport point for the international drug trade. In addition, internal consumption has spiralled and it is now a major market for drugs.

During his visit this week, Fedotov met with government officials to discuss future cooperation, in regional and global associations.

In Brasilia, he told reporters that Brazil was a global actor, and that UNODC was interested in its support and participation in global issues like the fight against transnational organised crime and illegal drugs.

Abdulhakim Belhasi (r), the spokesperson for the Libyan special police unit set up in 2012 under the crime squad to fight drug and alcohol trafficking, with two men from the sqaud. Credit: Maryline Dumas/IPS

By Maryline Dumas
TRIPOLI, Apr 4 2013 (IPS)

In Libya, a dose of LSD or the painkiller tramadol costs 78 cents, and a joint of cannabis is 7.80 dollars. Here, drugs are affordable to the poor for a simple reason. “Slashing prices is a way to create demand and open up a market,” a Western diplomat tells IPS in Tripoli, the capital.

“Prices will go up when enough people are hooked,” the diplomat, who works on defence and security, adds.

There is currently no data on the number of addicts in Libya, but the drug trade is thriving. Dr. Abdullah Fannar, the deputy director at a psychiatric hospital in Gargaresh, a wealthy suburb in east Tripoli, has noticed a change in the number of drug addicts they see there.

“The number of people suffering from addiction to illegal substances has increased. We used to have a special department for drug addiction 10 years ago, and are thinking of reopening it.”

Fannar says he receives patients from prison referred by the police, or people referred by their families, when they are suffering from withdrawal.

According to Fannar, the drug epidemic has hit “the youth and rebel soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder from the war.” Other vulnerable groups — those with little education and military veterans — are easily drawn to drugs and alcohol, both of which are illegal in Libya. In early March, several dozen people died as a result of poisoning from methanol contained in locally adulterated alcohol.

Drug and alcohol trafficking are not new to Libya. Under former President Muammar Gaddafi (1969-2011), a number of United Nations reports made reference to the illegal trade between Africa and Europe via Libya. But with limited border controls under the new Libyan government, the drug trade has grown.

“We know we have a problem of alcohol and drug smuggling, especially on our southern borders,” Colonel Adel Barasi, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence, admits to IPS. “We are working on a surveillance strategy, training and equipping the army. God willing, the Libyan army will be able to protect our borders.”

Céline Bardet, an expert on war crimes and transnational crime, tells IPS that drug routes are drawn up at a global level, targeting unstable countries where security is weak.

“This is how things stand in Libya. There is a great deal of trafficking, and it’s likely to get worse,” she says.

Bardet, a consultant with the European Commission, believes that drug processing laboratories may exist in Libya, even if none have been found yet. Still, she points out: “The police are starting to tackle the problem with the support of international aid.”

In an eastern district of Tripoli, a special police unit set up in 2012 under the crime squad is proud to demonstrate the results of its fight against drug and alcohol trafficking.

Abdulhakim Belhasi, the spokesperson for the unit, showed IPS the seizures – seven kilogrammes of heroin and cocaine, unknown amounts of cannabis, 1,400 tablets of tramadol, unknown quantities of whiskey and vodka, and 1,400 litres of adulterated alcohol. The seizures are stored in a hangar, to be destroyed.

In the last drug seizure, which was announced on Feb. 23 by the spokesperson of the Libyan Navy, Colonel Ayoub Gacem, 30 tonnes of drugs were seized and three people were detained on a boat intercepted by Libyan coast guards the day before. The type of drugs found was not specified.

“A war is being waged through the drug trade. They want to destroy the moral fabric of our youth. It can only be Gaddafists in neighbouring countries driving this trade. They are the only ones with this kind of money,” Belhasi tells IPS, appealing for international assistance.

A young drug user who wishes to remain anonymous laughs off this statement. “Having a drink and smoking a joint has never hurt anyone! The ‘beards’ (Islamists) are hounding us so that they can impose Sharia law.”

Khaled Kara, a member of an anti-drug organisation, and former mayor of Souq-al-Juma, a district in Tripoli, denies this. “I wear a beard, I look like an Islamist but I am a moderate,” he tells IPS.

Kara is worried. “The drug traffickers are very violent. They will do anything to protect their business. They are better armed than the special unit. They have rocket launchers, while the police only have handguns.”

The men of the special unit say they would like to be better armed, and add that they also face other kinds of pressures. “My 18-month-old son was kidnapped,” says an officer who goes by the single name of Kamal for security reasons. “He was only taken for a few hours, but when I found him, there was a message for me. ‘If you don’t resign, next time it will be your wife.’”

Asked by IPS if he is afraid, Kamal, who is admired by his comrades for his acts of bravery during the revolution, simply replies: “I am here, I am working.”

One of his colleagues adds: “We fought the revolution for our country, we are fighting the drug dealers for our country.”

But most members of the special unit go out in the field wearing balaclavas.