Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0044/00447.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 9KB | 161 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00447}
$Pretitle{266}
$Title{Bolivia
Coca Leaf Farming and Cocaine}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Peter McFarren}
$Affiliation{Embassy of Bolivia, Washington DC}
$Subject{coca
cocaine
economy
drug
bolivian
chapare
government
leaves
bolivia
bolivia's}
$Date{1989}
$Log{Coca Farming*0044701.scf
}
Country:     Bolivia
Book:        The Cultural Guide of Bolivia
Author:      Peter McFarren
Affiliation: Embassy of Bolivia, Washington DC
Date:        1989

Coca Leaf Farming and Cocaine

[See Coca Farming: Top: Bolivian anti-drug police operating in the Chapare
inspecting bundles with cocaine paste. Bottom: Quechua speaking family drying
cocoa leaves in the Chapere, Cochamba. Courtesy Embassy of Bolivia,
Washington.]

     Samuel Zambrana, 61, waited several hours to be received by an agronomist
who will verify the hectares of coca plants he will destroy. "I do not have
any income now and I cannot get my harvest of oranges and bananas to the
market because of bad roads. If the government is going to take away our coca,
we need alternative crops, good roads and a market for our products", he said.

     Thousands of other farmers such as Zambrana live and work in the Chapare,
the first link in the processing of cocaine paste and cocaine that eventually
reaches the streets of American and European cities. They are also the most
vulnerable as the drop and rise of prices leaves them at the mercy of
traffickers and government agencies who are under pressure from the U.S.
Government to stop growing coca plants.

     Patricia Guzman works her wicker broom back and forth over the carpet of
mottled green leaves she has spread out by the side of the highway. A squat,
powerful woman with sunbaked skin like chapped leather, she can neither write
nor tell how old she is. But like many other Bolivian campesinos, she knows
the arithmetic of survival. Even in a bad year, she figures, her coca crop
earns far more than the rice she might otherwise grow. "And besides", she
adds," with coca you get four crops a year. Rice is harvested only once."

     Benadicta Torres stands by an empty patio where she would normally be
drying coca leaves. With the price of coca leaves selling below the cost of
production, she has decided to destroy one hectare of plants in exchange for
2,000 U.S. dollars from the Bolivian government." Things are desperate and I
don't know how I'm going to feed my kids," she said.

     Such is life along Bolivia's "cocaine highway", a rugged two-lane stretch
of tarmac that winds through Bolivia's remote Chapare Province, 200 miles
east of La Paz and connects the cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. The road
hardly looks like a major economic artery. Mud huts, ramshackle bars and the
occasional gas station hug the roadside. Now and then a narrow dirt track
veers off to the left or right and disappears into the surrounding hills and
jungle. Yet surprising as it may seem, the Chapare is the backbone of a
clandestine economy. As Bolivia's traditional industries slid into decline, a
new underground economy developed and blossomed into an industry that brings
in an estimated 300 million dollars a year. The industry corrupted military
officers and helped finance the 1980 coup which installed a military
dictatorship. Drugs have also corrupted the police and judicial system. Drug
lords have become wealthy and powerful and worked their way into government
institutions.

     Today the Chapare is the source of a third of the world's cocaine.
Roughly 300,000 people earn a living growing coca leaves or grinding them into
the paste that is processed into the pure narcotic smuggled overseas. The
illegal trade is believed to bring in as much as half all legal exports
combined. And though the drug economy has fostered widespread addiction and
generated heavy political pressures at home and abroad, most Bolivians agree
that, without cocaine, the nation's economy would be seriously affected.
"Bolivia has gone from the economy of tin to the economy of coca," says former
Bolivian Finance Minister Flavio Machicado. "If narcotics were to disappear
overnight, we would have rampant unemployment. There would be open protest and
violence."

     Those social pressures might normally have boiled over long ago. Bolivia
has not collapsed, economically or politically, and a large part of the reason
is cocaine. Though unemployment in Bolivia's legitimate economy stands at an
estimated 22 percent, many economists believe the true rate is much lower; the
drug trade has sopped up the difference. Unemployed miners descend on the
Chapare, searching for - and finding - jobs as farmhands or transporters
for Bolivia's drug barons. And as the illicit economy has grown, so have the
legitimate businesses that serve it and its workers: grocery stores, dry-goods
outfits, auto-repair shops. In the cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz cocaine
traffickers have invested their earnings in night clubs, ranches and car
dealerships.

     Here and there the forests are giving way to new buildings and trading
encampments. A thicket of television antennas pokes up above dusty adobe
villages. Toyota pickup trucks and Honda motorbikes ply the rutted dirt
streets. Night and day, cars, buses and trucks pound up and down the Chapare
highway.

     The prevalence, and importance, of the drug economy has stymied the
government efforts to curb it. Since 1983 Bolivians have worked with the
United States - the destination of most Bolivian cocaine - to limit coca
production by uprooting acreage and offering financial incentives to farmers
to grow legitimate crops. In early 1990 coca leaf eradication took off as a
result of the drug crackdown in Colombia and increased interdiction activities
in the Chapare and Beni where most of the sulfate and cocaine processing labs
are located.

     The Bolivian anti-drug forces are now better trained and equipped, backed
by the presence of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Border Patrol
agents and Special Forces military trainers.

     The Bolivian government has linked coca leaf eradication to development
aid to finance the transition from coca to other crops.

     As the drug economy has expanded, its darker side has shown more clearly.
Since 1980 the incidence of drug addiction throughout the country has soared.
There are now an estimated 80,000 cocaine addicts in Bolivia, according to
government figures; many of the addicts are youths who work in remote coca
factories as "stompers", day laborers who trudge back and forth in vats of
acid and kerosene, which dissolve the coca leaves into paste. They earn as
much as $12 for a 10 hour shift, nearly half the official minimum monthly
wage. To relieve the numbing tedium of the work they smoke pitillos, potent
cigarettes laced with cocaine paste." After three months of that, the child is
finished," says a foreign diplomat in La Paz." His legs are burned from the
acid and his mind is gone."

A lost resource

     In fact, addiction is but one of the social costs of the cocaine economy.
The lion's share of the drug business is conducted by a handful of leading
traffickers who channel their illegal earnings into foreign bank accounts and
overseas investments. Thus the bulk of the Bolivian coca dollars are a lost
resource that never reaches the legitimate economy where it could benefit the
country's poor masses. There is the added danger that the cocaine business
will in time become so ingrained in Bolivian society that it cannot be
eradicated." As the (drug barons) accumulate wealth, they organize into armed
camps, which become a risk to the authorities," says former Bolivian Planning
Minister Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. There are also widespread accusations that
law enforcement officials and judges have been corrupted by the cocaine
industry.

     For Bolivians a solution to the cocaine problem involves coordinated
efforts and financing from consumer nations. As long as cocaine continues to
be widely used in the U.S. and Europe and the economies of producing nations
de