Breu, Peru – Guiding his canoe along a jungle-shrouded river, Fernando Aroni steers towards the water’s edge, cuts the outboard motor and climbs a muddy embankment to a police outpost nearly swallowed by forest.
Inside, dead bats litter the broken floorboards, and a sign on the wall bearing Peru’s national emblem, emblazoned with the words “God, Country and Law” blisters and peels. The outpost stands at the 38th boundary line, a remote stretch of Amazon rainforest demarcating Peru’s border with Brazil.
“This police checkpoint has been abandoned for over 10 years. Smugglers are taking advantage,” said Aroni, the 41-year-old leader of Santa Rosa, an Indigenous Amahuaca village whose territory edges up to this wild border. “We’ve been forgotten by the Peruvian authorities.”
Along the untamed edge of Peru’s Ucayali department, the cultivation of coca — the raw ingredient in cocaine — is surging. A metastasised drug trade, once concentrated within the folds of the Andes, has descended into this lowland jungle region, threatening the reserves of some of the world’s most isolated tribespeople.
Narcotics experts and Indigenous communities blame an anemic state security apparatus, whose absence along its borders has created “an open door” for the accelerating drug trade.
The Amahuaca are no strangers to state abandonment. They have enjoyed few resources in their efforts to survive disease, poverty and territorial conflict, as missionaries and industries like rubber and logging pushed into their home territory.
Source from www.aljazeera.com