Updated November 16, 2025 at 6:01 AM EST
UCAYALI, Peru — As they patrol their ancestral territory deep in the Amazon, some of the members of the Kakataibo Indigenous Guard carry spears.
Others wield machetes. Several have traditional bows and arrows and one has an ancient shotgun slung over his shoulder.
Threading their way along overgrown paths and wading through rivers, the mission of this tightly-knit group of Indigenous villagers is deadly serious — to find illicit plantations of coca, the key ingredient in cocaine, on tribal land.
"We don't want it here," says one, who asks to go unnamed for fear of reprisals from the drug traffickers. "Coca just brings trouble. It means death, for us and the forest."
Cultivation of the Andean crop is booming here in Peru — the world's second-largest producer of cocaine.
An increasing amount is now being grown in the Peruvian Amazon. It's a vast and often lawless frontier zone, larger than Texas. The region is also home to some of the last Indigenous hunter-gatherers on Earth, who still live cut off from the outside world.
The number of hectares of coca in the South American nation rose from nearly 43,000 (106,255 acres) in 2013 to nearly 90,000 (more than 222,000 acres) in 2024. The country now produces an estimated 850 tons of cocaine a year, production fueled by the global demand for the drug, including in the world's largest consumer market, the United States.
Here in the lowland region of Ucayali, there are an estimated 12,000 hectares (nearly 30,000 acres) of coca as well as dozens of clandestine landing strips, including on titled Indigenous land and even within reserves for some of those extremely vulnerable isolated tribes.
With the coca comes corruption, deforestation and bloodshed.
In recent years, around 20 Indigenous leaders have been murdered in Peru for opposing the drug traffickers and illegal loggers who frequently work hand in hand with them. Six of them were Kakataibo, a small ethnic group whose several thousand members are spread out across the central Peruvian Amazon.
The jungle heat actually results in a weaker, lower quality product than coca grown in the mountains. But it is also easier to smuggle the cocaine over Peru's long jungle border with Brazil and Bolivia than transport it over the Andes to Peru's Pacific ports and main international airport in Lima.
Dirandro, Peru's specialist counternarcotics police, are struggling to keep up. Eradicating crops is like playing whack-a-mole in this sprawling jungle territory.
Dirandro Commander David Mori Trigoso says his men work valiantly in difficult circumstances as he shows a cocaine press, used to make 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) bricks of the hard drug, seized in a recent operation. "We're always pursuing the narcos but they also keep evolving," he adds.
Eventually, after nearly two hours of bushwhacking, the Indigenous Guard comes to a series of verdant cliffs rising spectacularly out of the rainforest.
This remote spot is not just where the Andes meets the Amazon but also the start of a government reserve for the last Kakataibo families still living in what anthropologists call "voluntary isolation."
They prefer that term over "uncontacted." These Indigenous communities have consciously chosen to retreat deeper into the jungle because of past traumatic encounters with outsiders — including disease, massacres and enslavement.
The Indigenous Guard launch a drone and within three minutes it has geolocated two separate fields of coca inside the reserve. They will now report this to the authorities.
One woman tells NPR that the Kakataibo inside the reserve, who may be her distant relatives, are terrified by the drug traffickers. "They're in their habitat but they feel invaded," she says. "So, we have to always protect them."
The danger is all-too real. Segundo Pino, the leader of the Kakataibo Indigenous Guard, points out a recent death threat he has received on his cellphone. In misspelt Spanish brimming with epithets, it promises that Pino and other Kakataibo leaders are going to "fall one by one" and that "blood will be spilled."
"How do we defend ourselves?" Pino asks. "We've lost faith in our authorities. That's why we've set up the Indigenous Guard. We must defend ourselves. We have no choice."
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