After an hour-long hike from the nearest road, a Honduran anti-narcotics inspector with a shotgun slung from his shoulder led the way into a mountainside clearing littered with wilting coca bushes his unit had uprooted in the days before.
Black irrigation hoses crisscrossed the roughly four-acre field down to the confluence of two creeks, where, under a canopy, lay the charred remains of a makeshift laboratory for processing the coca leaves into paste – the precursor of cocaine.
