By Ivan BrehautRodrigo PedrosoVictoria Carlos
JAVARI VALLEY, Brazil/Colombia/Peru — When teenager Isaías was offered work in the coca fields along the Javari River, he saw an opportunity to change his life. To endure the rigors of the rainforest and a heavy workload, the pay was double what he could get in the nearby towns of Santa Rosa, Islandia, Atalaia or Tabatinga — all part of the tri-border area between Peru, Colombia and Brazil in the Amazon.
Isaías would be paid 500 Peruvian soles in advance, about $135, or the equivalent in Colombian pesos or Brazilian reais. At least, that was the story Isaías told his mother in August 2023, months after the last time he contacted his family.
Since then, Isaías’s mother has seen him on only one occasion. He looked slender and solemn, as if he would rather not see her again. They crossed paths by chance when he was getting off a motorcycle carrying packages in the port of Tabatinga, in Brazil, bordering the Colombian town of Leticia. Between these towns and the opposite bank of the Amazon River lies the island of Santa Rosa, in Peruvian territory, making this site the confluence of three countries and two rivers: the Amazon and the Javari.
Isaías greeted his mother, gave her 100 soles (about $27), a half smile, and said “I’m going home soon” — a promise never fulfilled. The teenager’s last known whereabouts are believed to be somewhere in the rainforest between the Amazon and Javari, on the Peruvian side of the border, where his mother knows people rarely come back from.
Young men trying to rest after working on a trading boat near Leticia, Colombia. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
“Bosses,” “dealers” or “businessmen” are usually behind these job offers and who, without further identification, take young people like Isaías away from their homes and turn them into invisible, untraceable workers in a burgeoning criminal underworld at the heart of the world’s greatest rainforest.
The Brazilian side of the Javari Valley made headlines two years ago when Brazilian Indigenous rights advocate and expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Tom Philips were murdered here. Pereira and Phillips had encountered into a gang of illegal fishers and were shot dead in an ambush in June 2022.
Our team traveled along the Javari River to the main towns of the triple frontier and the city of Iquitos in Peru to report on the expansion of drug trafficking in the region and its impact on locals and nature. Most of the interviewees asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons since the tri-border region between Peru, Colombia and Brazil is one of the most dangerous parts of the Amazon.
Coca plants on a farm in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest in the Lower Amazon region of Peru, near the Javari River. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
More coca, more deforestation
A tributary of the Amazon River, the Javari, which forms a natural border between Brazil and Peru, is one of the most pristine places in the rainforest, home to communities of riverine, Indigenous and isolated peoples.
Since 2020, drug traffickers groups have entered the Javari Valley (known in Brazil as Vale do Javari) and expanded the production and transport of cocaine and its derivatives (such as crack), according to local authorities, NGO staff and Indigenous leaders. The latest official data from the Peruvian government show that coca farms in Mariscal Ramón Castilla province, which covers the lower and middle part of the Javari River, grew by 35% between 2021 and 2022, to 8,610 hectares (21,276 acres).
Within the province’s Yavari district, more than doubled from 2020 to 1,211 hectares (2,992 acres) in 2022, helping to make Peru’s Lower Amazon region the third-largest coca-producing area in the country.
The coca expansion has driven deforestation. From 2020 to 2022, 16,987 hectares (41,976 acres) of native forest were lost in Mariscal Ramón Castilla, with nearly a third of this occurring in Yavari district, according to official data.
Experts and locals say cartels center their drug production on the Peruvian side of the border due to a relatively weaker state presence there. Drug kingpins have also established cocaine-producing laboratories near the coca farms, often in small villages along the Amazon and Javari rivers. These gangs, experts say, are connected with large Brazilian cartels with international reach, such as PCC and Comando Vermelho, and GAORs, the residual armed groups that walked away from the Colombian government peace agreement in 2016 with the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
An Indigenous couple goes back home after a day working on a coca farm in Cushillococha, Peru, an island in the middle of the Amazon River and surrounded by coca crops. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
The cocaine expansion has called for a new workforce, and gangs are recruiting Indigenous and mestizo youths, often teenagers. They persuade them to drop out of school to work on the farms and in drug-trafficking logistics, frequently against the wishes of their parents and community elders. In remote rainforest areas, the youths spend weeks or months isolated from their families.
Once they start working for logging or drug-trafficking groups, many are threatened with death if they express the wish to leave. Sources from the Peruvian antinarcotics police force, DIRANDRO, in the department of Loreto, which includes Mariscal Ramón Castilla, said this recruitment method has spread across a large swath of the border region, taking advantage of the poverty of communities here.
“They promise anything they want, and the young people leave everything, school and their families, for the promise of a very high salary compared to their household income,” an anonymous officer said. “But that’s just a hook, a deception in the end.”
Although the recruitment isn’t violent at first, the young workers are detained if they decide to leave, according to sources. A common practice is to threaten them or their relatives with death.
In the logging business along the Javari, the recruitment system operates similarly. The hard days of logging are paid for with low wages and some alcohol or drugs. Women brought to the camps as cooks end up being forced into sex work as well.
A young man carrying a bag in Benjamin Constant’s city port, by the Javari River. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
Recruitment is a daily occurrence in the tri-border area, but people fear reporting it to the authorities. A source from the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Trafficking in Persons in Iquitos, the capital of Loreto department, said there isn’t a system for reporting this kind of crime in Peru, and that when families look for the police, the crime isn’t recorded as people trafficking, but rather as crimes against honor and other criminal offenses. Brazil and Colombia also don’t have a public record of this type of crime in the region.
“There is a clear underreporting of human trafficking cases,” said Gabriel Arriarán, an anthropologist who conducted a study on the issue in the tri-border area. “This crime is part of the criminal chains supported by drug trafficking, illegal logging, and money laundering.” He added that human trafficking operations have strong connections to the sex and drug trades.
From Peru, the cocaine travels through a maze of trails, ravines and creeks, mastered by the gangs from Brazil and Colombia, from where it will be sold or shipped.
Narcotrafficking overlaps with other illegal activities in the region, like logging, prostitution, and fish and wild animal smuggling. Locals report that drug trafficking is increasingly funding these other crimes.
As a result, the tri-border region faces high levels of violence, which, according to Peruvian police officers in two border towns, are also underreported. Officially, Loreto is one of the departments with the lowest homicide rates in the country, according to the government statistics agency, INEI, with fewer than three homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
In stark contrast, neighboring Leticia, in Colombia, has a rate of 45 homicides per 100,000. On the Brazilian side of the border, Tabatinga has the second-highest murder rate in the state of Amazonas, at 106 homicides per 100,000 residents. That makes this Brazilian tri-border municipality five times more violent than the rest of the country.
A Colombian Navy boat patrols the Amazon River near Leticia, Tabatinga and Santa Rosa. It’s the only visible presence of state security forces in the river that runs through this tri-border region. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
A discreet support network
The Catholic missionaries of Islandia, a small island at the end of the Javari River, are aware of the problem of human trafficking, forced labor conditions, and the estrangement of Indigenous people caught up in the illegal trades.
“We have managed to recover more than 14 people, many of them minors, while they were being taken away from their communities,” said a nun who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. “When there is a complaint, when a family member or friend alerts us, we communicate with friends in the area. We tell people to look for the missing person. Sometimes we get on boats or go to the businesses in the ports. We have been lucky with these 14 young people, but we know that there are many, many more.
“It is sad to see how the schools are empty in some communities along the river Javari,” she added. “The children are all working in la raspa [harvesting coca leaves]. Entire families are dedicated to it. And what can we do? Without investment, without commerce, people live only for their daily bread, hoping to earn a little more to leave.”
Police from Brazil, Colombia and Peru all say there’s a shortage of funding to maintain a successful crime-fighting strategy in the tri-border area.
“We should have helicopters [flying over the region] all year round, but the budget is only enough for short windows of time,” said Jose Rengifo, a police colonel in charge of antinarcotics operations in Loreto. “In other words, if we cover this strategic part of the operational logistics, the results [in the fight against drug trafficking] would be four or five times more conclusive than what we have today.”
Anti drug police colonel Jose Rengifo during an interview in Iquitos. He is leading the Peruvian efforts to control drug production in the region. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
But for Arriarán, the anthropologist, the problem isn’t just about fighting crime through law enforcement efforts; clear government responses are needed to improve the local economy and tackle the lack of basic services, he said.
“Every young man or woman who leaves school has the option of working in timber, coca, prostitution, or, with a lot of luck, to emigrate, but in many cases they will fall into the same traps,” he said. “There will be no change if the countries’ development policies for these territories do not improve.”
Meanwhile, Isaías’s mother says she still hopes to find her son in the Tabatinga port. She says she wishes to see him again and ask his forgiveness for not taking better care of him, for not being able to put him through school, and for neglecting him when she had to take care of the other children.
“I miss him, but sometimes I think he is better off,” she said. “Now I have to make sure that his 14-year-old sister doesn’t leave, that she doesn’t get tricked, that she doesn’t get taken away.”
Banner image: Two young people ride a motorbike on the street that divides Tabatinga in Brazil from Leticia in Colombia. Crime rates have risen sharply in the region. Image by Ivan Brehaut.
This story was funded and supported by the Consortium to Support Independent Journalism in Latin America (CAPIR), led by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR).
This article was originally published on Mongabay
