They descended into a shallow depression, forded the stream that wound its way along the bottom, and then climbed up the opposite bank until they were inside the jungle again.

“It is a dangerous life,” del Pozo said. “The government is always looking. Thousands of raspachines have been jailed. Others have been shot. And they fly planes overhead and dump gallons of glyphosate onto the trees. Scorched earth. The chemicals destroy everything.”

They pressed on, the rain hammering on the canopy of leaves overhead, a deluge that shook the branches and flooded the ground whenever there was a gap in the cover. They squelched through mud and forded more streams that, despite seemingly being so far away from civilisation, smelled strongly of petrol.

At last Geronimo stopped and pointed. “We are here.”

The kitchen was hidden in the centre of a stand of tall palm trees. Their fronds had reached out and knotted together over the years, providing a natural roof and a screen to prevent detection from the air. The trees were wrapped with vines, and, as Milton watched, he saw a man clamber up one of them with a machete to hack down the fruit so that it didn’t fall and injure someone below. Vegetation had been stripped away from between the trunks of the trees, and the laboratory established among them. It was a simple wooden structure, the tarpaulin roof held up by joists and ropes that were wrapped around the trunks. A short distance away from the building was a stack of jerrycans that must have accounted for the pungent smell of gasoline that Milton had noticed as they made their way to the kitchen, and perhaps for the effluent that he had seen in the streams.

Milton saw a line of men and women making their way to the kitchen from the other side of the small clearing. They were each carrying burlap sacks, some balancing a single larger one on their shoulders, others hefting two, one in each hand. The men and women formed a queue in front of a man with a notebook and pen. The man addressed the peasant who was at the head of the line, weighed his sack on a large set of digital scales, handed over a sum of money and then scribbled down a note in his book.

“What’s he doing?”

“This is a perfect supply line,” del Pozo said. “The farmers bring coca leaves to the kitchens. They sell it—five thousand pesos for twenty pounds.”

“Five thousand? How much is that?”