Peru’s newly elected President, Alberto Fujimori, thought the Americans were too hung up on a military solution. He said the only thing that would get the farmers to stop growing coca would be to give the them an alternative crop so they could make a living. To the dismay of U.S. officials, Fujimori refused to accept military aid until it was accompanied by economic assistance. Congress finally appropriated some $60 million in farm aid, but any real impact would have called for ten or twenty times that amount, and there was no way Congress was going to drop that kind of cash into the Amazon jungle.^[14]

Without meaningful incentives, getting peasants to voluntarily switch crops was a tough sale, even in the face of military force. Put yourself in the place of a farmer who’s been asked to pull up his coca fields and plant tomatoes or rice or beans. Most legitimate crops require tillable fields, fertilizer, and insecticides which all cost money. The crops have to be watered, weeded and watched over. The coca plant, on the other hand, is almost indestructible.  It will grow anywhere, including the sheer face of a cliff, and it will flourish in soil too poor to support anything else.  It has built-in resistance to the local bugs, and unlike tomatoes, rice, or beans—which have to be reseeded each season—a single coca plant can last 40 years.  Instead of one or two crops a year, you can harvest coca leaves every ninety days. As a farmer-friendly shrub, about the only thing that could beat Erythroxylum coca would be a money tree.^[15]

Even without these natural advantages, coca would still have been the crop of choice in this remote outback because the Huallaga is too far from the coast for anything else to pay off.  The road to Lima is a grinding 70-hour round trip in second gear. It is cheaper for people in Lima to ship a redwood log 4000 miles from San Francisco than to ship it over the mountain from Tingo Maria.  Coca, on the other hand, almost levitates itself out of the jungle. The buyer comes to you, pays cash, he handles the shipping himself, and there’s no red tape at customs. On top of that, he pays up to $1000 an acre