'We have no choice': Indigenous guards take on cocaine gangs in Peru's Amazon
toggle caption Simeon Tegel for NPR
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 unn
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