{"id":2354,"date":"2025-04-02T05:03:49","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T05:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/?p=2354"},"modified":"2025-04-03T05:39:49","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T05:39:49","slug":"por-nicolas-vargas-varillas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/por-nicolas-vargas-varillas\/","title":{"rendered":"Not all are illegal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Not all are illegal<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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By Nicol\u00e1s Vargas Varillas<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe current wave of insecurity and violence sweeping Peru should serve as an opportunity to\nreflect on the crime circuits that exist in our country, and how both the private and public sectors\ncan contribute to stopping them. Over the years, we have been horrified by \u201cminor\u201d or \u201cstreet\u201d\ncrimes, such as muggings, robberies or kidnappings on the street, however, we are even more\nsurprised when, upon seeing about the criminal gangs that incur in these acts, we discover that\nthey are linked to much larger criminal organizations and endowed with a complex structure,\nwhich can then make it difficult to have a strategy to face crime. One issue that I personally believe\nis important to study, however, is the link between crime, criminal organizations, and illegal\neconomies, and how this nefarious combination manages to create \u201cthe perfect storm\u201d for chaos\nand insecurity in some parts of the country, where total and absolute misgovernment reigns. For\nthis, I will build in this article on two cases that I have had the opportunity to study closely for\ndifferent reasons: one being the infamous case of the VRAEM, and the other that of Chala, on the\nnorthern coast of the department of Arequipa.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe case of the VRAEM is one that we are all too familiar with in Peru. The coca-growing basin\nhas not only been the most important centre of cocaine cultivation and production in the country,\nbut has also served as a magnet to attract an endless number of economic activities (formal,\ninformal, illegal) that arrive there given the logical presence of people who, in search of a better\nfuture for their families, feel compelled to become part of the dynamic economy that the coca leaf\nprovides. Thus, in the towns of San Francisco, Kimbiri, Pichari or Santa Rosa it is very easy to\nfind hotels, restaurants, workshops or supermarkets full of people working in the parasitic\neconomic activities of drug trafficking, often these businesses are not owned by locals from the\nVRAEM, but by Huantino, Huamanguino or Cusquenian migrants attracted by the possibility of\nhaving a prosperous business of their own. The dynamism of the area is such that it is not\nuncommon to walk through Huanta or Huamanga and see caravans of 4x4 pickup trucks that act\nas buses to the different towns in the Apur\u00edmac River valley, as well as bus stops full of people\nqueuing for a seat to the jungle along the route, which, by the way, is not completely paved.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The case of Chala is not very different. Chala used to be an important port for the cattle ranching population of the southern part of the Ayacucho region, specifically those from the provinces of Lucanas, Parinacochas and Paucar del Sara Sara. The merchants of this area used to go down to the Arequipa port in order to ship their cattle to the city's dock, which was also very important for the fishery, which was then sold in other parts of the country. This reality was displaced by the boom in illegal mining, which is a common denominator in the province of Caravel\u00ed, to which Chala belongs, as well as in the neighbouring provinces of southern Ica and Ayacucho. On the stretch of the Panamerican Highway South that crosses Chala it is not uncommon today to see a myriad of hardware stores and stores selling equipment useful for small-scale mining, from wheelbarrows and earth strainers to heavy machinery, as well as laboratories where the purity of the extracted ore is defined. However, it is also common to see a proliferation of brothels and bars, many of them informal, and which also end up being a magnet for illegal activities such as the illicit drug trade, or even worse, human trafficking.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWith these very brief examples I want to try to bring up a reality, and that is that illegal activities,\nwhich the population often recognizes as such, are also engines of local economies, thus promoting\na dynamism that allows many people who, in the absence of opportunities, find in the related\nactivities that arise from these illegal economies a chance to bring bread to the table of their homes.\nThis is how the question arises as to how to intervene, from the state but also from the private\nsector, in places where illegal economies prevail, given that this is not only a question of security\n(it is no secret the enormous vulnerabilities suffered by, for example, the mining company La\nPoderosa in Pataz), but also how to help citizens to have access to opportunities to continue\ndeveloping economically, as well as to provide them with basic public services.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe bad reputation that places like the VRAEM or Chala, as well as Pataz or La Rinconada, have\nacquired over the years should not be a reason to ignore the complex reality that the local\npopulation faces, and should instead be a special motivation to design accompanying policies,\nsince only then can we really combat illegal economies effectively.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No todos son ilegales Por Nicol\u00e1s Vargas Varillas La actual ola de inseguridad y violencia que azota al Per\u00fa debe servir como una oportunidad para reflexionar sobre los circuitos de crimen que existen en nuestro pa\u00eds, y sobre c\u00f3mo tanto el sector privado como el sector p\u00fablico pueden contribuir a detenerlos. A lo largo de […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2354"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2483,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions\/2483"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apexperu.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}