Miguel Guimaraes Vásquez fought for years to protect his homeland in the Peruvian Amazon from deforestation related to the cocaine trade, even laboring under death threats from drug traffickers.
A leader in an Indigenous rights group, Vasquez said such efforts were long supported by financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which spent billions of dollars starting in the 1980s to help farmers in Peru shift from growing coca for cocaine production to legal crops such as coffee and cacao for chocolate. The agency funded economic and agricultural training and technology, and helped farmers gain access to international markets.
But the Trump administration’s recent sweeping cuts to the agency have thrown that tradition of U.S. assistance into doubt, and Indigenous people in the Amazon worry that without American support there will be a resurgence of the cocaine market, increased threats to their land and potentially violent challenges to their human rights.
“We don’t have the U.S.... Read more
