Cocaine eradication scheme impacts thousands

(17 Aug 2015) Thousands of Peruvians have lost their livelihoods as a result of the government's eradication campaign, backed by the United States, to destroy the plant used to make cocaine.
Roughly a half million Peruvians have been affected, with officials offering them only paltry compensation, or none at all, for the loss of their coca plants.
Edma Duran lives with her husband and six children in the village of Nuevo Canaveral, which lacks electricity, phones and running water, and is five hours from the nearest doctor.
Their coca plot of less than a hectare (2.5 acres) was destroyed during a recent operation in under half an hour by 70 men with hoes, who were guarded by armed police.
According to Peru's government, 42,000 families got financial support or help with alternative crops last year after their coca fields were destroyed.
But many of the 95,000 families affected by eradication get no assistance or, like Duran, have rejected what was offered in protest.
The growers say they want eradication halted until the government offers them better alternatives for making a living.
Carlos Figueroa, an alternative development expert with Peru's counterdrug agency, says that while the coca growers are not drug-traffickers, the drug trafficking operation in the area draws them into the criminal production chain.
Police say that in the region where Duran lives they've detected more than 300 cocaine laboratories in the past two years and about 20 clandestine airstrips used by small planes to fly cocaine to Bolivia.
Peru destroyed a record 55,000 hectares (550 square kilometres) of coca plantations in 2013-14 and the government says it's on track this year to destroy another 35,000 hectares (350 square kilometres).

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