In Peru, the law on drugs does not punish drug use or drug possession for personal use by imprisonment. Nonetheless, as the Peru chapter of the study Systems Overload: Drug Laws and Prisons in Latin America concludes, the Peruvian authorities treat drug use as if it were criminal conduct. As a result, the police are overwhelmed, trials are delayed, and the prisons are filled.
“Under Peruvian law, drug use is not punishable by imprisonment, which is appropriate, because problematic drug users deserve treatment, not imprisonment,” according to Ricardo Soberón, author of the Peru chapter in the research study coordinated by the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
Diana Esther Guzmán, Giorgina Garibotto and Ricardo Soberón
Nonetheless, according to statistics obtained from the Peruvian National Police, the study finds that since 1997, it appears that nearly 60 percent of arrests related to drug offenses are of users. “In practice, users are detained until the authorities determine whether the person was carrying drugs for his or her own consumption or for sale. In other words, the users are treated as guilty until they prove their innocence.”
In addition, in the case of crimes related to drug trafficking, the authorities can hold someone in preventive detention for up to 15 days, when the normal period is 24 hours. “Holding a suspected large-scale drug trafficker in preventive detention for 15 days may make sense, but it is unjustifiable in the case of users,” says Soberón, who is also director of the Centro de Investigación Drogas y Derechos Humanos (CIDDH, or Drugs and Human Rights Research Center). “Two weeks in prison is an interruption in anyone’s life, but it is a serious violation when one considers that the alleged crime doesn’t even exist in the law.”
In December 2009, Peru had a prison population of 44,735 persons, according to data from the National Penitentiary Institute (INPE). At present, 23 percent of the prisoners in Peru are behind bars for drug-related offenses. At the same time, data from the Office of the Public Prosecutor specialized in drug offenses show that micro-trafficking offenses predominate over macro-trafficking offenses by 72 to 28 percent, respectively, from 2000 to 2008. “I’ve been in many Peruvian prisons, and it appears that most of these micro-traffickers are peasant farmers, youths, poor mestizos, and indigenous persons,” says Soberón.
In addition, those incarcerated for drug offenses, whether micro-traffickers or macro-traffickers, are denied common prison benefits: permission to leave, reduction of the sentence for work and study, semi-liberty, probation, conjugal visits, etc. “This lack of benefits prevents those who are in prison for drugs from having an adequate process of social re-adaptation. Without wanting to, we are fostering recidivism,” says Soberón.
Focusing government efforts on micro-offenders is not only ineffective in reducing drug trafficking, for the micro-trafficking positions are extremely easy to replace, it is also counterproductive in many ways, the study concludes. “The police are overwhelmed and the courts are saturated, which results in innocent persons being caught up in legal proceedings for much longer than is admissible,” says Soberón. At present, 61 percent of the Peruvian prison population is charged and facing trial, and 39 percent have been convicted, which reflects a delay in justice that on many occasions is drawn out for months or years.
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