A Faint Cold Fear by Robert Daley

Author:Robert Daley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: violence, bolivia, nypd, peru, colombia, kidnappings, drug enforcement, medellin cartel, amazon drug factory, new york journalist
Publisher: Robert Daley

Before dawn the DEA contingent and about thirty troops boarded a military transport which brought them to Tingo Maria at the head of the valley. It was daylight by then and very hot. Four American built helicopters were waiting. To Douglas they were old and rickety looking, and the pilots were Peruvian. The machines had been brought up close to Tingo the day before, but not too close, for no one wanted news of their coming to reach the traffickers, or the Shining Path guerillas either. The men climbed on board, and the rotors lifted them up into the air.

The Huallaga river feeds into the Amazon. Its valley is l50 miles long, ten to twenty miles wide. The temperature is sub-tropical and its vegetation used to be thick rain forest. From the air Douglas saw that this was no longer the case. The chain saws had worked overtime. The devastation was almost total. For mile after mile every tree had been cut down, and fires started. Nearly the entire valley had been deforested. The foliage and underbrush had burned, but the trunks most times had not. Trees lay in incredible profusion in the disorder in which they had fallen. They lay half on top of one another pointing in every direction. From the air it looked like someone had upended a box of straws except that in every open space amid the straws coca bushes now grew.

In the last few years, Douglas knew, following the collapse of the international tin market and the closing of the mines, about 60,000 impoverished peasants and laborers had moved into the valley to grow coca. They didn't care about Harlem or Watts. Coca to them meant a job, food, shoes for their children. More of them arrived every day. The chainsaws were still working. On the ground or in a glider, Douglas might have heard them. Over the banging rotor racket of course he could not, nor could he see the fall of individual giant trees, but he could see the smoke from the fires, blue plumes that rose up into the humid tropical air, then flattened out into a thin haze. The plumes were all around the tiny flotilla, twenty or more of them all the way to the horizon.

People, even international organizations, were worried about what Brazil's roads and ranches were doing to its jungle, Douglas reflected, but no one even mentioned what the coca plantations were doing to vast sections of that same jungle in Peru, and in Bolivia as well. The ecological cost was staggering, and not only in terms of soil erosion—more than soil was running off into the rivers. The chemical runoff from the processing labs was killing animals and fish, was poisoning the entire Amazon river system. If we were indeed all part of the same world, then somehow it ought to be stopped.

But he looked down from the open sided helicopter at hundreds, at thousands of lime green patches of coca bushes, and did not see how it could be stopped here.

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