Peru: From Virtual Success to Realistic Policies?
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Publication date:
The Peruvian government has become the victim of the false image of success of its drug control policies it launched at the end of the 1990's. The international community needs to recognise the reasons for Peru's so-called success proving unsustainable and to help the country design and draft a more effective anti-drug strategy.
Authors
Key problems
- Increasing coca cultivation
- New opium poppy cultivation
- Consolidation of criminal drug trafficking organisations
- Forced eradication within the framework of programmes of the previous Fujimori administration
- Crop substitution without the necessary technical studies and without funds reaching peasants
- Lack of funds for infrastructural and alternative development programmes
Recommendations
- Voluntary and consensual crop reduction only if programmes promised to peasants are carried out
- Law enforcement targeted at organised crime and state corruption
- Support from European Union and international community to efforts to redraft drugs policy
- Reconsideration of alternative development
- Transparency in the management of funds
- US should withdraw pressures and conditions for aid
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