Drug trade’s lowest rung: Peru’s cocaine backpackers
The lung-searing ascents into the Andean highlands aren’t what worry the untold hundreds of young men who hump backpacks loaded with drugs out of the remote, lawless valley that produces about 60 percent of Peru’s cocaine.
Armed gangs, crooked police and rival backpacker groups regularly rob cocaine’s beasts of burden on their three- to five-day journeys over mountain paths carved by their pre-Incan ancestors.