living wage here. And he could do it virtually risk-free, since the local police had been effectively “dissuaded” from pursuing their enforcement responsibilities overvehemently, at least in regard to farmers associated with Arriaga’s cartel.
What was more, coca was the region’s most sensible crop in terms of conservation and ecology, two subjects to which the professor was so commendably devoted, and to which Arriaga himself was deeply committed. Tea, coffee, palm oil trees—these took years to begin producing, and rivers of sweat. Coca shrubs would be ready for harvesting in one season. And they would thrive in poor soil, where coffee and tea crops would not without constant attention. Moreover, they would not deplete the nutrient-deprived jungle soil, as so many other crops would.
Nod, nod, nod, went Scofield, who in truth was in substantial agreement with Arriaga’s arguments but was increasingly anxious for him to get to the point.
And, with the moral and ecological justifications out of the way, here it came. For every quarter hectare of land—roughly half an acre—that Scofield could convince one of his local farmer acquaintances to convert to coca growing, he would receive a onetime honorarium of one thousand dollars. Afterward, there would be an annual payment of five hundred dollars per quarter hectare as long as reasonable production was maintained. If the farmer himself successfully undertook the conversion of the leaves to coca paste (not a simple operation) for further pay, there would be another two hundred dollars per quarter hectare per year for Scofield. Was Scofield interested?
Scofield was fascinated.
That had been nine years ago, and now, with almost no expenditure of effort, he was pulling in an extracurricular income of $55,000 a year, paid in good, green, American dollars, and tax-free at that. By the sixth year, however, he had exhausted his contacts in the Huallaga Valley. His earnings were no longer increasing. Knowledgeable now about the ins and outs of the underground coca economy, he itched to branch out on his own. Naturally, he didn’t dare to do anything that Arriaga might perceive as treading on his turf, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about other options.
His opportunity had come ten months ago, when the Peruvian government had announced the coming reinstitution of its “airbridge denial” policy, a drug interdiction program in which military jets hunted and shot down the planes of traffickers hauling coca paste to Colombia for processing into cocaine. The program had been introduced by President Fujimori in 1992 with great success, but it had
been halted a few years later because of international outrage over the botched shooting down of a missionary’s plane that resulted in the killing of an innocent American woman and her daughter. But now the outrage was forgotten, and the sleek, Russian-made Sukhoi Su25s of the Peruvian Air Force were again aggressively scouring the skies, hunting down unauthorized airplanes. Air transport was now out of the question. The only alternatives were transport by water and by foot.
This was a staggering blow to Hector Arriaga and his kind. Tingo Maria was five hundred miles from the Colombian border, a four-hour trip in a small plane—but two difficult, risk-filled weeks on rough jungle paths for even the fastest “two-legged mule.” And at best, these runners were capable of carrying no more than fifty kilos of cocaine paste on their backs. A disaster.
On the other hand, for the Amazon River Basin itself it was a windfall. Amazon coca was inferior to that grown on the higher, drier slopes of the Huallaga Valley, and therefore brought less money and was in less demand. There were no Arriagas there, only a gaggle of small-time traffickers who paid low-end prices to their farmers. But with the skies effectively shut down, the Amazon River and its tributaries reemerged as effective means of transport to Colombia, and the coca grown within a day or two’s walk of it was about to become a far more cost-efficient commodity.
Arden Scofield realized this before the small-time traffickers did. As soon as the government announced its plans to retake the skies, he contacted a Cali cocaine manufacturer he’d met a couple of times to discuss certain mutually advantageous possibilities he had in mind relating to the transport of Peruvian coca paste to Colombia. Senor Veloso expressed his interest, and they talked figures for a while.
A highly motivated Scofield then set up a university-sponsored trip to North Loreto Province, ostensibly to talk ecology with Amazonian farmers. But it was coca growing he wanted to talk about. This time, however, he wasn’t primarily interested in converting coffee or tobacco farms to coca growing. Instead, he sought out the known coca farmers and paste producers, of whom there were many, and offered them all more or less the same proposition: if they would skim off a small amount of their paste production, say ten percent (virtually unnoticeable by their bosses, given the vagaries of jungle agriculture), he would buy it from them at exactly double the prices they were getting from the local traffickers. It was a deal few could resist, especially when it was sweetened with a promised five hundred American dollars up front, no strings attached.
He then got in touch again with Veloso, his new Cali connection, to discuss the specifics of delivery. Veloso would have nothing to do with getting the paste across the border and into Colombia. That was Scofield’s job; how did he propose to do it? Scofield, uncertain on this point, asked for the Colombian’s advice.
Veloso told him that there were two or three small coffee and tobacco warehouses on the Javaro River, a northern tributary of the Amazon, just over the Colombian border from Peru. They had been used as drug pickup points before, when river traffic had briefly become more practical during the previous air interdiction, and could well serve that purpose again. The one he had in mind—not far from the village of San Jose de Chiquitos—was somewhat run-down at the moment, but if Scofield could guarantee a steady supply, Veloso would have it rebuilt and made stronger by native laborers. Veloso would also arrange for them to stay on as watchmen. Now, could Scofield make such a guarantee?
His heart in his mouth, Scofield said he could.
Fine, said Veloso; they would begin work at once. But there was one more problem to be considered. Vessels approaching these warehouses were routinely stopped and inspected at the military police checkpoint at the border and would be under even more careful scrutiny now. Scofield’s best bet, Veloso suggested, was to somehow get the paste aboard an ordinary Peruvian cargo ship that had been making the run to these warehouses in the past, a ship that was already a familiar sight at the border checkpoint and that was well-equipped with the necessary permits. And most important, a ship with a captain who was known to have standing “arrangements” with customs authorities that would preclude any overzealous searches for items on which the duties had perhaps been inadvertently overlooked, and similar contraband that might be aboard.
Which was where Vargas and the
