Little Tiny Teeth (7 page)

And what Arden Scofield had in mind had little to do with ethnobotanical expeditions. What he was interested in was the more than $120,000 he would net from the 150 kilos of coca paste “rocks” – the gritty, sand-colored balls of coca-leaf derivative – that the ship would now be carrying. The individually wrapped rocks, grouped into eight-quart, white plastic kitchen garbage bags, would be stowed among the contents of the four dozen sixty-kilo bags of coffee beans that the Adelita was transporting to a riverfront warehouse in Colombia. From there, they would be picked up by runners and taken to Cali, where they would be refined into fifty kilos of “white gold” – pure, top-quality cocaine hydrochloride for the high-end North American trade.

In other words, the esteemed professor was a “ narco” on the side – a drug trafficker, one of the many thousands in Peru that make the international cocaine trade possible. While it is true that the majority of finished cocaine seen on the streets of Europe and the United States is made in Colombia, most of the coca paste from which it is processed comes from Peru, which produces three-quarters of the world’s supply of coca. And well over half of that is grown along the infamous “coca belt” – mainly the Huallaga Valley, the main commercial hub of which is Tingo Maria. Which happened to be where the resourceful professor resided three or four months a year.

On Scofield’s behalf it had to be said that he’d come with no intention of getting involved in the local drug commerce. But when certain opportunities more or less fell into his lap, his perceptions changed. And opportunities weren’t long in coming.

As head of an extension program that trained rain-forest farmers in the techniques of sustainable, ecologically sound farming, he was expected to make periodic trips into the jungle to talk with and evaluate growers of tea, tobacco, and other legal crops. These visits, which generally lasted a week or ten days, were usually made alone, in the university’s four-wheel-drive Land Rover. Interesting anybody else in ten days of backcountry, showerless travel, bouncing over remote, rocky roads in the dry season, or wallowing through them, hubcap-deep, in the rainy season, was an unlikely proposition.

A few days after he had returned from his second such solitary tour, he was invited for coffee to the estate of one Hector Arriaga a few miles north of the city. Scofield had already learned – it was one of the first things that a newcomer had better learn – that one did not idly flaunt the wishes of Hector Arriaga, who was the region’s patron, the local boss representing the Medellin cocaine cartel in the Tingo Maria area. As such, he was both feared as the brutal, dangerous man he was, yet respected as one who was generous with his money, who helped the poor and contributed richly to the church, and who “removed” bothersome petty criminals and crazy or violent outsiders far more efficiently than the police. Known by all, he could eat, drink, buy clothes, and entertain his friends with nothing in his pocket. His name and his reputation were more than enough to guarantee payment.

And when he invited someone for coffee, someone came.

All that aside, Scofield’s curiosity was piqued. And so three days later, having been picked up outside his apartment by two stony, wordless men in a richly polished maroon Bentley limousine – a refurbished London taxi, Scofield thought – he sat opposite Arriaga at a glass table on the latter’s awninged stone terrace overlooking six acres of unbroken, close-cropped lawn. (When you live in the jungle, open space is the most desirable of all vistas.)

Arriaga himself was a disappointment, a long way from the Hollywood version of a drug baron. No gold chains around his neck, no massive gold rings on his fingers. A toad-faced, acne-scarred, lisping man wearing boxy green Bermudas drawn almost up to his armpits by wide, striped suspenders, he got down to business at once, not bothering at all with pleasantries. Over Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee served in Spode bone china cups that had been delivered by another hard, silent man – this one with the checkered grip of a semiautomatic pistol prominently protruding from a shoulder holster – Arriaga bluntly got started. Did Scofield know what the average annual earnings were for a small coffee or tea farmer in the Huallaga Valley?

Scofield did. In American money, approximately four hundred dollars.

True, said Arriaga. In other words, they were working themselves to death for barely enough to survive on. And did Scofield happen to know what that same farmer could earn growing coca leaves and converting them into coca paste?

Probably more, Scofield said prudently.

Much more, Arriaga told him. Something on the order of twelve hundred dollars, a living wage here. And he could do it virtually risk-free, since the local police had been effectively “dissuaded” from pursuing their enforcement responsibilities overvehemently, at least in regard to farmers associated with Arriaga’s cartel.

What was more, coca was the region’s most sensible crop in terms of conservation and ecology, two subjects to which the professor was so commendably devoted, and to which Arriaga himself was deeply committed. Tea, coffee, palm oil trees – these took years to begin producing, and rivers of sweat. Coca shrubs would be ready for harvesting in one season. And they would thrive in poor soil, where coffee and tea crops would not without constant attention. Moreover, they would not deplete the nutrient-deprived jungle soil, as so many other crops would.

Nod, nod, nod, went Scofield, who in truth was in substantial agreement with Arriaga’s arguments but was increasingly anxious for him to get to the point.

And, with the moral and ecological justifications out of the way, here it came. For every quarter hectare of land – roughly half an acre – that Scofield could convince one of his local farmer acquaintances to convert to coca growing, he would receive a onetime honorarium of one thousand dollars. Afterward, there would be an annual payment of five hundred dollars per quarter hectare as long as reasonable production was maintained. If the farmer himself successfully undertook the conversion of the leaves to coca paste (not a simple operation) for further pay, there would be another two hundred dollars per quarter hectare per year for Scofield. Was Scofield interested?

Scofield was fascinated.

That had been nine years ago, and now, with almost no expenditure of effort, he was pulling in an extracurricular income of $55,000 a year, paid in good, green, American dollars, and tax-free at that. By the sixth year, however, he had exhausted his contacts in the Huallaga Valley. His earnings were no longer increasing. Knowledgeable now about the ins and outs of the underground coca economy, he itched to branch out on his own. Naturally, he didn’t dare to do anything that Arriaga might perceive as treading on his turf, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about other options.

His opportunity had come ten months ago, when the Peruvian government had announced the coming reinstitution of its “air-bridge denial” policy, a drug interdiction program in which military jets hunted and shot down the planes of traffickers hauling coca paste to Colombia for processing into cocaine. The program had been introduced by President Fujimori in 1992 with great success, but it had been halted a few years later because of international outrage over the botched shooting down of a missionary’s plane that resulted in the killing of an innocent American woman and her daughter. But now the outrage was forgotten, and the sleek, Russian-made Sukhoi Su-25s of the Peruvian Air Force were again aggressively scouring the skies, hunting down unauthorized airplanes. Air transport was now out of the question. The only alternatives were transport by water and by foot.

This was a staggering blow to Hector Arriaga and his kind. Tingo Maria was five hundred miles from the Colombian border, a four-hour trip in a small plane – but two difficult, risk-filled weeks on rough jungle paths for even the fastest “two-legged mule.” And at best, these runners were capable of carrying no more than fifty kilos of cocaine paste on their backs. A disaster.

On the other hand, for the Amazon River Basin itself it was a windfall. Amazon coca was inferior to that grown on the higher, drier slopes of the Huallaga Valley, and therefore brought less money and was in less demand. There were no Arriagas there, only a gaggle of small-time traffickers who paid low-end prices to their farmers. But with the skies effectively shut down, the Amazon River and its tributaries reemerged as effective means of transport to Colombia, and the coca grown within a day or two’s walk of it was about to become a far more cost-efficient commodity.

Arden Scofield realized this before the small-time traffickers did. As soon as the government announced its plans to retake the skies, he contacted a Cali cocaine manufacturer he’d met a couple of times to discuss certain mutually advantageous possibilities he had in mind relating to the transport of Peruvian coca paste to Colombia. Senor Veloso expressed his interest, and they talked figures for a while.

A highly motivated Scofield then set up a university-sponsored trip to North Loreto Province, ostensibly to talk ecology with Amazonian farmers. But it was coca growing he wanted to talk about. This time, however, he wasn’t primarily interested in converting coffee or tobacco farms to coca growing. Instead, he sought out the known coca farmers and paste producers, of whom there were many, and offered them all more or less the same proposition: if they would skim off a small amount of their paste production, say ten percent (virtually unnoticeable by their bosses, given the vagaries of jungle agriculture), he would buy it from them at exactly double the prices they were getting from the local traffickers. It was a deal few could resist, especially when it was sweetened with a promised five hundred American dollars up front, no strings attached.

He then got in touch again with Veloso, his new Cali connection, to discuss the specifics of delivery. Veloso would have nothing to do with getting the paste across the border and into Colombia. That was Scofield’s job; how did he propose to do it? Scofield, uncertain on this point, asked for the Colombian’s advice.

Veloso told him that there were two or three small coffee and tobacco warehouses on the Javaro River, a northern tributary of the Amazon, just over the Colombian border from Peru. They had been used as drug pickup points before, when river traffic had briefly become more practical during the previous air interdiction, and could well serve that purpose again. The one he had in mind – not far from the village of San Jose de Chiquitos – was somewhat run-down at the moment, but if Scofield could guarantee a steady supply, Veloso would have it rebuilt and made stronger by native laborers. Veloso would also arrange for them to stay on as watchmen. Now, could Scofield make such a guarantee?

His heart in his mouth, Scofield said he could.

Fine, said Veloso; they would begin work at once. But there was one more problem to be considered. Vessels approaching these warehouses were routinely stopped and inspected at the military police checkpoint at the border and would be under even more careful scrutiny now. Scofield’s best bet, Veloso suggested, was to somehow get the paste aboard an ordinary Peruvian cargo ship that had been making the run to these warehouses in the past, a ship that was already a familiar sight at the border checkpoint and that was well-equipped with the necessary permits. And most important, a ship with a captain who was known to have standing “arrangements” with customs authorities that would preclude any overzealous searches for items on which the duties had perhaps been inadvertently overlooked, and similar contraband that might be aboard.

Which was where Vargas and the Adelita came in.

It is an axiom among airport personnel in Iquitos that Yanquis are a cranky and irksome lot. There may or may not be something to this, but in fairness it should be pointed out that nobody arriving in Iquitos from the United States is likely to be at the top of his form when he gets there. There are no direct flights to Iquitos from anywhere in the United States. To reach it, one must fly first to Lima and then change planes for the flight to Iquitos. The problem is that while almost every incoming flight from the States to Lima arrives between eleven P.M. and midnight, nothing leaves for Iquitos or anywhere else until six-thirty in the morning. This means that already flight-weary through-passengers generally spend the night in the airport, inasmuch as the two-hour customs and immigration hassle they went through upon arriving, and the hour or so that would be consumed in getting to and from a hotel, would leave something like an hour and a half for sleeping (or trying to sleep) before being roused by a four A.M. wake-up call, amounting to something closer to torture than rest.

And when you’ve arrived in Lima by way of a round-trip, bargain-basement $599 itinerary all the way from Seattle, Washington, there are a few additional catches. John, Phil, and Gideon had boarded an American Airlines flight to Dallas at six A.M. the previous morning, from where they’d flown to Miami, and then finally on to Lima’s Aeropuerto Jorge Chavez. By the time they cleared customs in Lima they’d been in transit for twenty hours and they looked and felt it: grungy, stubble-faced, and weary. To make things worse, the chairs at Jorge Chavez are famous for being few in number and extraordinarily uncomfortable for sleeping.

Still, four hours later, awaiting departure for Iquitos, they were again in reasonable spirits. Phil was a world-class sleeper. Within fifteen minutes of arriving at the airport proper, he had been snoozing away in a corner of the polished floor on a $1.59 plastic air mattress purchased from a Seattle-area G.I. Joe’s for this express purpose. A fair number of other experienced old hands were already doing the same, paying no attention at all to the nighttime floor-polishers moving slowly among them.

As for John and Gideon, they were both enthusiastic trencher-men, and there was an all-night food court at the airport at which they had spent their last couple of hours. John had been joyfully surprised to find that it included a McDonald’s, a Papa John’s, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he had happily indulged himself in the kind of fats-and-sugars orgy that was strictly verboten on the Lau home table. He had proclaimed the McDonald’s cuarto del libro every bit as good as what you got at home, and the donuts an acceptable facsimile. Gideon went to the nearby Manos Morenas counter to try his first Peruvian meal and also pronounced it good: marinated chicken brochettes and salsa on a bed of chewy hominy, accompanied by thick slices of boiled potato that had been fried to crisp the surfaces. Milk shakes de chocolate from McDonald’s and picarones from Manos Morenos – wonderful-smelling, deep-fried fritters that looked like onion rings but tasted like pumpkin – satisfactorily finished off the meal for both of them.