Epidemic of crack cocaine addiction sweeps Amazon basin
Traffickers target indigenous people to sell highly addictive drugs
“This is where the crack is sold,” says Josiane Otaviano Guilherme, picking her way down a litter-strewn alley between the encroaching vegetation and some wooden shacks, pointing to a cluster of huts. “It’s like a kind of street market. I once saw a mother feeding beer to her baby while the father took drugs.”
Otaviano is a community activist in Belém do Solimões, a small Brazilian town on the banks of the upper Amazon, where villagers have gathered to speak of their plight to visiting campaigners and researchers attending an indigenous summit in Tabatinga on the border with Colombia.
Some sobbed, and some shouted. But uniting the indigenous Amazon peoples at recent meetings was anger and alarm at how many of their children in one of the most remote areas of the planet were developing an addiction to crack cocaine.
Over the past decade, the Amazon river has become a major highway for the export of cocaine from Peru and Colombia to Europe and Africa. Traffickers press vulnerable indigenous communities into hiding stashes of drugs, smuggling them down river — and buying their own cocaine, often in the form of crack to smoke.
“Today we are asking for help,” said Carlos, one of the villagers. “We have people from the outside bringing in drugs and selling them in our community. We demand security but we have received no answers so far.”
Orlando Possuelo, an indigenous rights activist, recalled that on his first trip along the Amazon around 2001 he did not see drug use. “But I came a year or two ago and I was amazed,” he said. “Every single small town would have a party and at that party someone would offer you some kind of drug, usually cocaine. It’s affecting the whole Amazon river very badly.”
In one tragic recent case, Otaviano said, she was called to a house where the parents had lost patience with their addict son who was stealing to fund his habit. “The mother bought a big chain and tied his ankles with it to stop him going to the local crack den. He had been chained up for three months. It was a very sad scene.”
Brazil is the world’s second-largest consumer market for cocaine after the US. Law enforcement officials seized 128 tonnes of cocaine last year, according to shipping insurance claim handlers Proinde, but this figure represents only a fraction of the total smuggled.
Overstretched local police and security officials admit privately that they are fighting a losing battle against the well-resourced traffickers, who deploy speedboats equipped with radar, night-vision goggles and Starlink internet connections to ferry their valuable cargos down river.
“We have just 50 officers to patrol an area from here to Manaus, 1,100km away,” said one senior official. “We have no helicopters, so we patrol the rivers in boats but the traffickers have a web of informants, who tip them off long before we arrive.”
Francisco Gonçalves Peres, the local federal police chief, said well-organised gangs of drug traffickers, who had moved into the upper Amazon in recent years, found the indigenous populations an easy target.
“This contact of organised crime with the communities led to an explosion in drug consumption,” he said. “The communities are being used to store drugs, and drugs are also being sold to them.”
Police, who raided the village of San Rafael last year, he added, found four tonnes of cocaine being stored in a single house.
Brazil’s Amazon indigenous communities have no tradition of using cocaine, a highly concentrated drug extracted from the coca leaf that was traditionally grown in the Andean highlands and chewed for centuries by Incas or Aymaras to help them remain physically active at high altitudes.
In recent years, traffickers have developed strains of coca bush that can thrive in the lower-altitude, warmer and more humid environment of the Amazon. Large coca plantations and laboratories to process the leaf have sprung up across the border in neighbouring Peru.
In Atalaia do Norte, a Brazilian gateway town to the remote Javari lowlands that are home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, locals have begun selling small quantities of drugs, according to Nelly Duarte, a representative of the government’s indigenous agency Funai. “They start selling in order to supplement their income and that starts to get people addicted,” she explained.
As the cocaine trade has mushroomed across a vast area of jungle where communities subsist on fishing and growing crops, the quick riches offered by traffickers — and the quick highs from the drugs they sell — are hard for indigenous populations to resist.
The traffickers, said community leader Higson Dias Castelo Branco, “offer a better quality of life, alleging that Funai doesn’t help the indigenous communities and that they are there to help by paying the indigenous people. And along with the offer to help with money, comes the consumption of drugs.”
“Things have been getting much worse in the last three or four years and we just don’t have the power to fight this kind of crime.”
Downstream from Tabatinga in the mainly indigenous riverside town of Feijoal, community leaders beg the visiting activists for action to protect their children from the ravages of the drug trade.
“Young people here don’t want to study, they just want to sell drugs,” said one woman, who declined to give her name. She sobbed, as she added: “We have 12-year-old kids here trying drugs.”
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leftwing government has portrayed itself as a defender of native peoples and the environment, pledging to restore legal protections and enforcement agencies that were dismantled or cut back during the administration of his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
But in Tabatinga, a gritty riverside town bordering Colombia where vultures sit atop walls and decaying buildings are spray-painted with the initials of the Rio-based cartel Comando Vermelho, security officials complain that the Lula government has not delivered on many of its promises.
“Bolsonaro removed [police] but the Lula government has not made any effort to put them back” said Hueney Herlón Gomez, Tabatinga’s secretary of security. “That’s the criticism and that’s why people are demanding action.”
“In the absence of the state, organised crime has taken over,” he added. “What’s it all about? Dollars. A lot of money. And the people feeding this are addicts in Europe or America or Asia.”