Via the AP: Cocaine flows over Brazil-Bolivia border

in the tranquility, authorities see an increasingly sophisticated cocaine trade positioned to supply Brazil’s megacities to the east and Europe beyond.

The gateway for that trade is an imposing tangle of swamps, rivers, and rainforest along the 2,130-mile Brazil-Bolivia border, a daunting frontier neither country guards especially closely.

Bolivia has only one border officer for every 13 miles. On the Brazilian side, the sparse 100 border posts are manned by a patchwork of local and national officers.

Chemicals used to turn Bolivian coca leaf into cocaine flow easily from Brazil, and processed coca paste slips back just as easily, officials say.

“We have noticed a growth in the traffic of cocaine, and principally cocaine paste, over the last two years,” Marcio Paulo Buzanelli, director of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency, told The Associated Press. “One indication of this are the seizures in the Brazilian states that border Bolivia.”

Having been in the Amazon region where Colombia, Peru and Brazil come together as well as deeper into the Peruvian Amazon, it is hardly a surprise to learn that it is difficult to control what goes along these borders–especially the less populated the area.

In Peru I did see a law enforcement presence, part of which was clearly aimed at the drug trade. However, when ones looks at the handful of planes and boats and then looks out at the vast jungle and the seemingly endless rivers, and it is clear that if one wanted to move contraband, that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to do so if one knew the area.

This is just another in a long list of reasons why the drug trade is so difficult to control.