Lima. The Peruvian Congress approved on Thursday an agreement between Peru and the United States that will allow the interception of small planes transporting drugs to neighboring countries, an initiative that was in talks due to the increase in drug trafficking in recent years.
With 73 votes in favor and 30 against, the last hurdle that implements the agreement signed in August 2023 between the governments of Peru and the United States was overcome.
The interception agreement implies that small planes detected in Peruvian airspace will not be shot at, but rather that an aircraft will persuade them to land or leave Peruvian territory.
According to data from Peruvian police and military intelligence, every day an average of four small planes enter, especially from Bolivia and Brazil, to areas of the Peruvian Amazon, carrying around 1.2 tons a day abroad, which in one year adds up to around 378 tons by air. .
In August, the then Peruvian Prime Minister Alberto Otárola admitted the “exponential” increase in drug trafficking in almost the last decade. Using official figures, Otárola said that the areas of the Amazon where the coca leaf, the key ingredient to manufacture cocaine, is planted, totaled 95,000 hectares in 2022 and grew 135 percent since 2015.
In another different joint program, executed between 1995 and 2001, Peru and the United States shot down 14 small planes that sought to take laundered cocaine paste to Colombia, according to a 2008 CIA report that was declassified in 2010.
That agreement was canceled by the United States in 2001 when a small plane, the 15th of the joint program, carrying five American evangelicals, was mistakenly shot down. Two died: missionary Veronica Bowers and her young daughter.
Peru is one of the world’s leading producers of cocaine, according to the US anti-drug agency DEA, and the second largest global coca leaf grower after Colombia, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
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– 2024-04-25 00:04:46
