The Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics by Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt

Author:Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739159248
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

These observations mirror those of the Peruvian antidrug police. A 1993 internal police document claimed that 90 percent of the inhabitants of the districts on the Apurímac River engaged in various aspects of the drug economy, and that ronderos “controlled and protected” the airports from where traffickers shipped drugs.36 Investigative journalist Francisco Mattos confirmed that the ronderos played a crucial role in defeating the Sendero Luminoso rebels. However, he also pointed to future troubles for the Peruvian state. In 1994—1995, after the great decline in the price of coca leaves, the ronderos demanded immediate assistance programs for alternative products from the government. In an interview, Hugo Huilca Ovalle, the president of the Federation of Coca Growers in the valleys of the Apurímac and Ene rivers, threatened the Peruvian state. He claimed that

the government seems to have forgotten that we have fought the . . . . [rebels] with weapons we bought with the proceeds earned from cultivating coca. Now that we defeated the rebels, we do not want to abandon coca cultivation unless we are being offered a possibility of subsistence . . . . Given our resources, these weapons not only point at the rebels but also at another direction (La República. Aug. 13, 1995: 2).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.