Cocaleros. Violence, Drugs and Social Mobilization in the Post-Conflict Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru

During Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980s-1990s) the Upper Huallaga Valley became one of the most violent theaters of conflict, with political violence and violent crime becoming causally related phenomena. In the Upper Huallaga different sorts of armed actors (whether their motivations were political, ideological or financial) came into contact with one another, while boundaries between political and non-political violence in the region became more and more porous, and at times even disappeared entirely. As a result, power and control grew more and more diffuse, and the situation often disintegrated into lawlessness and chaos. Until the late 1990s the Upper Huallaga remained the world’s largest coca-producing region, a status it only lost to Colombia’s coca cultivating regions after the so-called “coca bust”, when the prices paid for Peruvian coca leaves dropped severely. The drop in prices never resulted in any discontinuation of coca cultivation. When the “war on drugs” in Colombia intensified in 1998, prices for coca began to rise again. As a result, Peru consolidated its position as the world’s second largest producer of cocaine. The present study shows that regional dynamics and complexities within internal armed conflicts can lead to partial conflict settlements that can severely disrupt local peace if managed ineffectively by the state. Even in post-conflict Peru, the Upper Huallaga Valley remained one of the country’s most violent areas, as the legacy of the internal armed conflict and new anti-drug operations led to new social tensions. To analyze the post-conflict social changes in the Upper Huallaga Valley, this study concentrates on post-conflict mobilization strategies of its population. In Peru, surprisingly it was in the Upper Huallaga’s cocaine-driven “margins of the state” where social reconstruction became an even more dynamic, multilayered process entailing the reconstruction of local community feelings, leading to a newly formed collective identity. Amazingly, it was in these narcopueblos (drug villages) where coca cultivation provided the groundwork of one of Peru’s important post-conflict social movements. Nevertheless, the Peruvian cocalero movement illustrates a complication, as an illegal activity became the foundation for the mobilization of thousands of campesinos to frame their demands. This study offers a detailed account of how a partial power vacuum in post-conflict settings, along with the existence of a powerful illegal economy, the presence of different armed actors, and the obstacles faced by social mobilizations and civil protest by the cocaleros (i.e., coca farmers), contribute to a regional continuation of violence. Specifically, it gives an in-depth account of the local narratives about internal armed conflict, the villagers’ responses to the ongoing violence, and the relations between the local post-conflict processes and the parallel national processes. All these factors constitute elements that are indispensable for a deeper understanding of violence in post-conflict societies where an illegal industry dominates the local economy.