Although President Evo Morales is maintaining the “zero cocaine” policy favored by Washington he draws the line at the U.S.-financed “zero coca” program. Since he took office January 22 Morales says Bollivia should be allowed to export legal coca-based products to stop the plant from finding its way into maceration pits.
Addressing the European Parliament this month (May), Morales asked why is coca “legal for Coca Cola but not for native peoples and peasants?”
Far from a rhetorical question, finding a workable solution to the coca issue is intrinsic to the country’s social, political and economic fabric, says Jim Shultz of Cochabamba based NGO the Democracy Center. It is also the main thorn in the side of Bolivia’s relations with the United States, according to US Embassy officials in La Paz.
As the populist Morales attempts to appease Washington and his political base, he has opted to continue with the consensual rather than forced coca eradication program of years past implemented last year by his predecessor, Carlos Mesa.
Like Mesa, Morales, who remains the president of the nation’s six coca growers federations, believes forced eradication creates social conflict and human rights abuses. Instead, security forces are concentrating on stopping the supply of chemicals used to produce cocaine as well as the destruction of cocaine laboratories and maceration pits.
Morales is also spearheading an international campaign to remove coca leaf from the list of controlled narcotics under the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics. He hopes that Bolivia in the near future will export legal coca-based products, such as the tea that is available at the U.S. Embassy in La Paz that helps visitors cope with the effects of high altitude. Taking a packet of that tea out of the country is illegal.
The EU is sympathetic to Morales’ cause but he faces a Herculean task convincing the United States. Anne Patterson, assistant secretary for international narcotics says Washington will veto any attempts to amend current international law as it maintains its strict antinarcotics policy. "I do not think this idea is going to prosper in the future and the U.S. is not going to support the idea either. In our opinion, there is not international support for this idea. The treaties, the importnat treaty is very clear about the point, and so I am not goig to say more," Patterson said during a visit to Bolivia in early May.
Bolivian companies are ready, willing and able to develop coca products for export. La Paz based tea producer Windsor Hansa Ltda, a recipient of USAID funding, generates 10 percent of its $1 million annual sales from coca teas. Edgar Barco, medical advisor at La Paz based coca derivative products company Coincoca says “our industry is a natural pharmacy” but it suffers from “the stigma that it is synonymous with cocaine.”
Laboritario Hahnemann, in La Paz, the only Bolivian company with a license to export medicinal products to the United States, exports remedies using native plants such as maca and cats claw and would like to export coca-based products. “An excellent market for these products would exist, however while the US has a policy penalizing this product, there is no possibility of exportation,” said operations manager Jamil Rodas.
But according to a European diplomat, Washington has adopted a “new diplomatic stance” since Morales became president. It “does not mean that they are happy, but they have opted to wait and see and approach the problem with dialogue with the government.”
This détente is giving Morales room to stabilize his government, something the country desperately needs, given that it has gone through five presidents in five years. “There is an open dialogue (between the United States and Bolivia) and we are very relived about this. There are strong differences of opinion so it could fall apart, but they are sitting down and talking to each other. Both sides are really trying,” said Kathryn Ledebur of Cochabamba-based NGO Andean Information Network.
Washington remains unhappy about the discrepancy between Bolivia’s controlled substances law 1008 that permits 12,000 hectares (29,652 acres) of coca to be grown in the Yungas region north of La Paz for traditional uses such as tea and mastication and the 26,500 hectares (65,482 acres) that the U.S. State Dept says Bolivia grows (up from 19,600 hectares in 2000). It is assumed the difference is used for cocaine production.
Compared to Colombia and Peru, Bolivia is small fry in cocaine production. From the mid-1990s its cocaine production capacity has fallen from 255 metric tons to 70 metric tons according to the 2006 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) released by the Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Colombia is thought to produce about 430 metric tons while Peru is the largest coca grower at 38,000 hectares (93,898 acres) under coca cultivation.
However, eradication has slowed as coca plants are now taken out at the root, a more labor intensive process than the past practice of using chemical herbicides.
“We eradicated more before but we do not have deaths now. The level of eradication has fallen noticeably but is compensated by the form. There is no violence,” said Bolivian Lt. Col. Jose Soliz of the Joint Task Force. He and other soldiers say that “if the farmer denies us permission we cannot enter his land.”
Kathryn Ledebur of NGO Andean Information Network, that seeks peaceful long-term solutions to the social conflicts, injustices, and inequalities created and exacerbated by the U.S. war on drugs in Bolivia, counters that despite cooperative eradication “coca production is not growing at a faster rate than it did under enforced eradication.”
Bolivia’s anti-narcotics force known as FELCN (Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotrafico) now focuses on intercepting drugs and chemicals. In 2005 it seized 11.5 metric tons of cocaine/base, 540,774 liters of chemicals needed to manufacture cocaine such as acetone and diesel, and 298,815 metric tons of sulfuric acid and bicarbonate of soda. It also destroyed 2,619 cocaine laboratories. So far this year, in Chapare, 1,082 maceration pits that make cocaine base have been destroyed and 1,086 hectares of coca have been eradicated.
Coca production could increase given that Morales has protected the one cato (40x40 meters) of coca that each family is allowed to grow in the Chapare and Yungas regions. In a country in which more than 65 percent of inhabitants live in poverty, the 40,000 families in the Chapare are happy about this. Coca has been the lifeline for the miners-turned farmers from the western mining regions that were displaced following the collapse of metal prices in the 1980s. “People can subsist with the cato. In some areas it is their only income and people want the cato protected,” said Edwin Castillo, administrative official in remote Chapre village Puerto Villaroel.
Coca is the perfect subsistence crop says Ledebur as it grows easily in unfertile soil, provides up to four harvests a year and is easy to transport.
“Coca growers want to put food on their tables. With their cato they can earn $80-$120 per month per family,” she says.
The success of the cato means Morales is “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Jim Shultz of The Democracy Center. He is under “enormous pressure from cocaleros to increase coca production because this increases their members income,” he said.
Despite coca federation claims that self-regulation has caused no rise in coca production, the United States disagrees. Its International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) report says that after years of declining coca production, it is now on the increase again. It says that in 2005, Bolivia’s coca cultivation increased eight percent overall — the fourth consecutive year of increase — even though the Government eradicated 6,000 hectares of coca. Still, Coca Growth is much less than before. But with about 26,500 hectares of coca planted in all Bolivia in 2005, this is still less than the highs of the early 1990s. In the chapare alone, according to the U.S. State Department, the areas planted with coca have fallen from 35,300 hectares in 1990 to 5,800 hectares in 2005 due to eradication policy.
One of the reasons for this decline is that, according to USAID, the area planted with legal crops such as bananas and pineapples have increased from 36,000 hectares in 1983 to 150,000 hectares in 2005 in the Chapare region. USAID pumps funds into the region to convert coca production into bananas, pineapples, oranges and palm hearts, but as coca is a higher value ‘crop’ many farmers like Edwin Castillo, who grows bananas and oranges, still grow the 40x40-meter cato the law allows because “it pays more and is easier to grow,” he said. “I have four hectares of bananas and produce 180 cases a week. Bananas are more work than coca. It is constant work,” added Geronimo Quispe, a farmer and father of four from the village of Nueva Canaan, who earns $124 per month.
Bananeros, through a growers association known as Caban, complain of being marginalized by the government. President Morales effectively ignores alternative crops as their success undermines his pro coca message that farmers have no alternatives to coca. His uneasy relationship with the bananeros stems from the road blocks organized by cocaleros in 2001 to impede banana exports when then, as now, he was leader of the coca federation.
“President Morales intends to damage the export of [bananas] to Europe to defend his thesis that people can only survive by growing coca in the Chapare. If we open the European market, his thesis about coca falls,” said Caban leader Miguel Zambrana.
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