The Surprising Climate Effect of Legalizing Cocaine
There are at least 76 illegal airstrips throughout the Peruvian Amazon, mostly located in Atalaya, Ucayali, according to a year-long investigation by Mongabay. Ten of the airstrips are splayed across forest concessions—harvesting-rights contracts designated to protect the forest or for sustainable use—but the areas where they are located have reportedly been taken over by drug cartels. There are around 3,000 airstrips in the Brazilian Amazon, according to InfoAmazonia; a third of them are in protected or Indigenous lands, per a report by the research collective, MapBiomas.
Close to one of the Ucayali airstrips, reporters earlier this year found plastic drums used to produce cocaine dumped at the edge of a river. The constant jettisoning of toxic chemicals from thousands of clandestine cocaine labs across the Amazon has long created mini ecological disaster zones.
As many as 15 Indigenous leaders have been murdered near Peruvian airstrips over the past five years, as communities have been surrounded by illegal coca cultivation and drug trafficking operations, according to Mongabay (though the exact number could not be independently verified). One Indigenous leader said that the increase in airstrips is tied to the rising murders, sometimes of land defenders objecting to cartels razing forested areas. “We do not really know how many die each day,” he told Mongabay. “There are no police officers, no authorities. The state has forgotten us.”
Airstrips help drug traffickers evade detection. “In most cases, I’ve seen roughly 800 kilos of pure cocaine in each trip that has been captured,” said Ricardo Soberón, former president of DEVIDA, Peru’s official drug control commission, who now campaigns for coca growers’ rights. “Having numerous landing sites gives the opportunity to make final decisions just before landing, so the police or military will not have time to arrive.”
The 76 airstrips in the Peruvian Amazon confirmed in the Mongabay report alone are not a major deforestation driver in a trend that has seen annual rates of deforestation in Peru quadruple in two decades, but the true number of airstrips is much higher, according to Soberón.
Coca production has risen steeply in recent years, and more than half of new coca crops in Ucayali from 2003 to 2022 were grown on deforested land, according to a 2024 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report.
“Criminal law has failed to control the supply of raw material for producing cocaine,” Soberón added. “We are witnessing a huge increase in the amount of cocaine airstrips and laboratories all across the jungle in Peru.”
At the same time, seizures of illegal timber have risen, the UNODC report said, confirming an exponential increase in clandestine airstrips. A separate study published in 2017 found that cocaine trafficking could account for up to 30% of deforestation across Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. “Cocaine trafficking is likely to have severe and lasting consequences in terms of maintaining moist tropical forest cover in Central America,” the study’s authors wrote.