Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

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.