an operating radius at these mountain altitudes of a little under a hundred miles, and since there was nothing to prevent the traffickers from going deeper into the jungle, the labs were simply moved out of reach.

The underlying problem was the staggering scale of the place, something that few people back in the States could comprehend.  In the spring of 1988 Ed Meese had taken a helicopter tour of the Huallaga valley and he found it a sobering experience. Cresting the Andes at Cerro de Pasco north of Lima, the Attorney General’s aircraft descended into an emerald ocean between two monumental ranges of the Andean Cordillera and came upon a living carpet undulating to the horizon in all directions. He found it “overpowering.”  He realized then that trying to stamp out this crop one plant at a time was going to be unrewarding.  The Huallaga Valley alone covers an area three times the size of Massachusetts.  Clearly, the answer was aerial spraying. What Meese pictured, no doubt, was a squadron of C-130s wingtip to wingtip raining Agent Orange, but that kind of nuclear solution was no longer possible. Even more modest proposals for airborne weed-killing quickly ran into flak from the Peruvians. The predictable outcry from environmentalists was followed by a flat refusal from the government.  Lima feared, quite rightly, that massive crop eradication would drive the farmers directly into the arms of the Sendero Luminoso. Beyond that, coca happened to be the country’s largest export.  One way or another over 20 million Peruvians were making a living off the plant. And since business was booming, there was plenty for everybody—judges, police commanders, politicians, army generals—even the country’s top narcotics officer.  Dispatches from the State Department were blunt on this point: “Corruption is endemic.”^[12]  It’s not hard to understand why.  When an army colonel with a base pay of $90 a month could turn a quick $15,000 by ignoring a single drug flight out of the Uchiza airport, anyone with reform on his mind was almost certain to be disappointed.^[13]