The Mochileros of Peru, transporting drugs to escape poverty

In the mountains of Peru, 92 percent of the people live in poverty. With no legal work available young boys often take to transporting coca to the city of Lima. The trek takes the young men through the mountains, where danger and bandits await them.

As found in the Taiwan News, writer Hugo Nedd from Agence France-Press tells us the mochileros story.

They are called "mochileros," or backpackers, many of them mere children, but in the dense jungles of southeast Peru they play a vital role, ferrying drugs on their backs to the outside world.

Traveling the most remote trails at night, this virtually invisible army is recruited from youths with no other way out of the poverty and neglect of the country's coca producing lowlands, experts say.

In the valley between the Apurimac and Ene Rivers, mochileros carry out coca - which is used to produce cocaine - by foot to the Andean highlands and from there to Lima in arduous, danger-filled treks aimed at satisfying the world's demand for the drug.

They travel armed and in groups, sometimes under the protection of Shining Path guerrillas, members of the Maoist group that waged a brutal insurgency in the country.

They can make up to US$150 apiece per trip, but the risks are enormous, with the army on the prowl or bandits laying in wait.

Peru's army chief General Otto Guivobich says "the mochileros don't travel alone but in groups, with the protection that the Shining Path gives them," and acknowledges they are hard to find.

In 2008, the commander of a military operation "encountered a column of mochileros of some 15 armed men, and there was a clash," he said. Seven mochileros were killed and seven firearms were captured, he said.

"Youths who have no secondary school education, seeing that their only option for continuing to study is in Ayacucho or Lima and what that costs, turn to the coca trade and end up as mochileros," said Edgar Licra, governor of the municipality of Llochegua.

In Andean communities, the mochileros are referred to as "the people who walk in the heights," a description also used to refer to the Shining Path.

"You travel at night on the paths that climb the sierra. Sometimes 30 or 40 mochileros will go. For security reasons, the minimum number is ten, with an armed guide and one who guards the rear," a former mochilero said.

The man, who would not give his name or say how he made a living, said he was 24 but had the weather-beaten look of an older man.

"In the group I knew each mochilero was allowed to carry no more than 10 kg for long trips of two or three days. Some asked to carry more to make more money, but they would not let them because they needed to walk quickly," he said.