Miguel Guimaraes Vasquez 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, 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.
