A key police outpost lies in ruins after a daring raid – a sign of the growing danger in an increasingly lucrative smuggling route
In the crime-infested tri-border region wheredisappeared, rumours abound over what happened at Puerto Amelia in January this year.
Five months after the audacious raid, the camp lies in ruins. Charred logs are the only remnant of a turquoise lodging the Peruvian troops had called home. “This is what the region is like now,” they sighed as they surveyed the deserted police position past which boats packed with drugs can now travel undisturbed. “It didn’t use to be like this.”
“The small [police] bases are too remote, too isolated, too exposed. You need bases with 200 to 300 men, not 10 or 20,” he said. He estimated that 120 tonnes of cocaine base paste were being smuggled across the porous frontier between Peru and Brazil every year. “Unfortunately, the state does not have the capacity to intervene sufficiently, and above all to support the Indigenous peoples of Ucayali who are on the border [with Brazil],” he said in Flor de Ucayali, the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous community where he was born.
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