Indigenous leaders get a choice: Join the narcos or run for your lives
YAMINO, Peru — For Herlin Odicio, the stranger’s offer was life-changing. The man, who had shown up unannounced in this remote Indigenous village speaking Spanish with a Colombian accent and calling himself “Fernando,” was proposing to pay Odicio $127,000 for each planeload of cocaine paste that took off from his community’s land. In return, Odicio, the elected leader of the Cacataibo people, would stop complaining to authorities about the drug traffickers destroying the rainforest to make way for coca fields, processing labs and airstrips. The money would be transformative. Many of the estimated…Read more …