Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution: “Three factors account for the increase in cocaine production in Peru: 1.) the growth in global demand for cocaine; 2.) the expanding presence of Colombian and Brazilian drug trafficking groups in Peru; and 3.) Peru’s struggling counternarcotics policies. Even as the world is experiencing a global revolution in synthetic drugs and the U.S. cocaine market has flattened, cocaine use has expanded in Europe, Australia and the Southern Cone and is creeping up even in Africa. Much of the cocaine consumed in western and central Europe originates in Peru (little from Peru heads to the United States). Cocaine use in Argentina and Brazil may well be on par with that of the United States. The remnants of the Shining Path still tax cocaine production in the traditional center of Peru’s cultivation—the VRAEM region. But Colombian and Brazilian traffickers have organized new…”