![\"Perus\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/03\/perus.jpg?w=620\")
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Peru has long vied with Colombia as the world’s top producer of cocaine, but has only periodically produced high profile\u00a0drug lords.<\/p>\n
Gerson G\u00e1lvez Calle \u2014 alias “Caracol” or Snail \u2014 is one of these.<\/p>\n
Caracol sprung to the nation’s attention late last year after news emerged that he was heading Peru’s largest and most violent drug ring, known as the Barrio King. It came just a year after he walked free from jail in highly controversial circumstances.<\/p>\n
The steady stream of revelations about Caracol’s sudden release, and the scale of his operations, have focused attention on\u00a0the cocaine industry’s deep penetration of the country’s institutions, fueling the sense that the country is slipping quietly but surely towards becoming a narco state.<\/p>\n
Soberon, the former head of Peru’s counter-narcotics agency Devida, who favors decriminalization, says Peru is “almost there.” Antezana, a law-and-order advocate who supports forced eradication of coca crops, agrees that the country “is close.”<\/p>\n
Antezana has taken particular aim at signs of narco influence in politics, causing a furor last year when he alleged that at least 10 of Peru’s 130-member legislature were in hock to the drugs trade.<\/p>\n
Numerous politicians, especially from the supporters of the jailed hard-right former president Alberto Fujimori, professed outrage. Some even threatened to sue him.<\/p>\n
Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko, is the presidential frontrunner, with a 20-point lead over her nearest rival as she campaigns on her father’s controversial legacy. She avoids all talk of the drugs trade. Her\u00a0press office\u00a0told VICE she is not giving interviews at this time.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Kenji Fujimori, Keiko’s brother and also a Fujimorista<\/em> congressman, was caught up in the 2013 discovery of 100kg of cocaine at a warehouse he co-owned in Peru’s lawless port city\u00a0Callao, which is also the country’s largest. He blamed the shipping company that had rented the facility.<\/p>\n “Everyone here knows it but no one wants to admit it,” says Antezana, about the growing role of cocaine cash in Peru’s public institutions. “When I say everyone, I am talking about the establishment. The general population gets it. This is a country where thousands of people, maybe even two million people, live\u00a0from the cocaine trade in some way.”<\/p>\n According to the latest data from the United Nations, Peru is currently the world’s second largest producer of cocaine.<\/p>\n In 2014, Peru had an estimated 42,900 hectares (106,008\u00a0acres) of coca, the key ingredient in cocaine. That same year Colombia took the top spot thanks to a dramatic 44 percent rise \u2014 attributed by some to unexpected repercussions of the country’s peace process \u2014 to 69,000 hectares (170,502 acres). Bolivia, the only other nation that produces significant quantities of the illicit crop, had 20,400 hectares (50,409\u00a0acres).<\/p>\n While Colombia’s coca harvest keeps the United States in cocaine, those of Peru and Bolivia fan out much more broadly across the globe. Their markets include Tokyo, London, and Brazil, the world’s second largest market after the US, where cheap, partially-processed and highly addictive cocaine paste, known as bazuco<\/em> or paco<\/em>, is popular in the favelas.<\/p>\n It is also still home to the last remnants of the Shining Path guerrillas, who triggered a civil war in the 1980s and 1990s that took nearly 70,000 lives. Now, the group has all but given up on Maoist revolution and instead charges protection to local drug traffickers, while launching ambushes on army foot patrols, and even shooting down the occasional military helicopter.<\/p>\n Much of the cocaine produced in the VRAE heads straight to neighboring Bolivia, via light aircraft or “backpackers” schlepping bricks of the drug over the densely-vegetated, precipitous frontier zone.<\/p>\n Other routes out of Peru\u00a0include the country’s 1,000-mile Amazon border with Brazil, through several Pacific ports, and from Lima’s international airport, either hidden in freight or carried by drug mules, who are typically paid around $3,000 dollars\u00a0to transport around two kilograms of the drug.<\/p>\n Antezana wants the government to better target the narcos’ financial flows and the precursor chemicals used to make cocaine.<\/p>\n “The mules and backpackers are the main focus of anti-narcotics strategy. They are on the bottom rung of the ladder, the lumpen proletariat of the industry,” he says. “Why haven’t more big players been taken down in Peru, like in Colombia or Mexico?”<\/p>\n One of the biggest players of the past, who supplied Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, was Demetrio Ch\u00e1vez, alias “Vaticano.” He was released earlier this month after 22 years in jail, and immediately began repeating allegations that that he paid $50,000 dollars a month to Vladimiro Montesinos, President Alberto Fujimori’s disgraced security adviser.<\/p>\n The drug lord was released from jail on October 3, 2014, thanks to a reduction of his sentence that was made in the name of addressing overcrowding. He had served 12 years of a 15-year sentence for attempted murder, robbery, and drug trafficking.<\/p>\n There have been claims that the prison director personally drove him out of\u00a0the Sarita Colonia jail in the\u00a0port of\u00a0Callao.\u00a0But the most telling detail is probably that prosecutors had requested his continued detention on new drug trafficking allegations just hours before he was freed.<\/p>\n Amid mutual recriminations, and an ongoing Interpol search that has spanned both Brazil and Ecuador, Peru’s director of prisons Julio Mag\u00e1n has blamed prosecutors and police for allegedly failing to notify his agency of the new criminal case against Caracol.<\/p>\n Even while behind bars, Caracol is suspected of heading the Barrio King, but it is only since he was freed that Peruvians are learning just how important he allegedly is.<\/p>\n Recordings by Constellation, a Peruvian counter-narcotics police surveillance program funded by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, appear to confirm that Caracol’s organization has been using military choppers to ferry cocaine from the VRAE to Callao.<\/p>\n “Bring it in a helicopter…to the garrison here in Lima, and with an official, state car, Ok?” one of Caracol’s alleged henchmen says in an audio leaked to the media just before Christmas. “From the garrison they will leave the merchandise at the door of your house.”<\/p>\n