COCA POLITICS

In Bolivia, Coca Growers Have Turned The 'Sacred Leaf' Into A National Symbol

Earlier this month, the United Nations reported that Colombia's coca crop
production has fallen 32 percent since the beginning of the year. Champions
of the US-financed eradication campaign declared a victory for the Bush
administration's drug policy, but others noted that production is rising in
nearby Peru and Bolivia. Indeed, in Bolivia, a defiant and popular
grass-roots movement has come to identify the coca leaf with the spirit and
future of the nation itself. If the United States is winning the drug war
on one front, it may be losing it elsewhere -- and badly.

The United States pays the Bolivian government $100 million a year to wipe
out coca leaves destined for the drug trade. (A small amount is legally
sold for traditional domestic use.) While the Bolivian military has had
intermittent success in suppressing cultivation, the coca-growers, or
cocaleros -- some 50,000 families, in a population of 8 million -- are
leading a groundswell of hostility to the army's efforts.

In elections in 2002 the cocalero Evo Morales, who called for an immediate
end to eradication, missed winning the presidency by only 1.5 percent of
the vote, while his party won one-fifth of the seats in congress. Morales
opposes almost every policy the United States supports, including IMF-style
fiscal austerity plans; his popularity surged after the then-US ambassador
spoke out against him. Many believe that if new elections were held
tomorrow the cocaleros would come to power -- placing US policy makers in
an awkward position.

The cocaleros take no responsibility for the cocaine trade, which they
blame on First World demand. There is some hypocrisy in their position, as
their organization is based in a region of Bolivia where coca is grown
mainly for Colombian cartels. Indeed, ending eradication would effectively
amount to decriminalizing the export of cocaine. Yet many of those who grow
the green leaves have never seen the white powder of cocaine. And no
evidence has linked Morales himself to the cartels, while many of his
mainstream political opponents have been accused of taking payoffs from
drug dealers -- allowing the cocaleros, paradoxically, the moral high
ground when it comes to illegal activities.

The growers know where the coca is going -- some carry the leaves to jungle
laboratories and stamp it down in kerosene to begin the refining process.
Yet Bolivians' involvement in international trafficking has remained small.
Most cocaleros work for themselves on their own land, earning independence
though seldom wealth, and this gives the crop a positive image in public
opinion.

The plant also has a unique prestige as the "sacred coca leaf," which has
lain at the heart of Andean folk religion since ancient times. The culture
and languages of the ancient Inca empire survive more strongly in Bolivia
than in the neighboring Andean countries of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru,
and coca symbolizes that survival. The leaf, which was domesticated over
4,000 years ago, can be brewed as a tea, but is usually chewed with a
bitter wood-ash paste to bring out stimulant properties similar to those of
caffeine or nicotine. (Native languages have several forms of the verb "to
chew" used only for coca.) It dampens hunger, fatigue, and (as foreign
visitors appreciate) altitude sickness.

Throughout the Andes, country people share coca in agricultural rituals, to
mark the purchase of a new truck or just to pass a sociable hour. Chewers
typically begin by blowing on three carefully selected leaves held between
four fingers, and follow a protocol of prayers and invitations as elaborate
as a Japanese tea ceremony.

Coca was one of the natural stimulants Europeans found when they first came
to America, along with chocolate and tobacco. The latter two became world
commodities, while coca stayed at home -- for a while. It took on a higher
profile in the 19th century when German chemists isolated cocaine from coca
leaves and hucksters promoted it as a tonic, most notably in the form of
Coca-Cola.

But while cocaine took on a life of its own, coca-chewing remained a rural
habit of the Andean Indian majority, despised by the Spanish-speaking
elite. In the 1960s the Bolivian government signed on to a 1961 United
Nations plan to wipe out the habit in 25 years, as an impediment to
national health and progress.

Not only did the plan fail, it led to a backlash as the coca question
became one of indigenous pride. In the past 40 years Indian communities
have increasingly demanded a role in the Bolivian state -- a nation where
most people live in villages and speak the native Quechua and Aymara
languages. Beginning in the 1970s, university students rejected
assimilation into the dominant Spanish-speaking culture and agitated for
Indian rights. Assuming pre-Hispanic leadership titles, they took over
government-sponsored farmers' unions and organized them to fight for native
land and autonomy.

These activists revived stories of Indian rebels who resisted the Spanish
empire, celebrating them in native-language radio programs. (At least one
activist spent a prison term earning a university degree in history.) The
most famous was Tupac Katari, who laid siege to the Spanish city of La Paz
in 1781, leading a major revolt just as British colonists won independence
in North America.

Unlike Washington and Adams, Tupac Katari was defeated and executed. But
two centuries later his memory is revered. The manifesto of the
pro-indigenous "Katarista" movement announces, "Tupac Katari vive y vuelve,
carajo!" (Tupac Katari is alive and returning, dammit!)

Eighteenth-century memories are especially resonant because Bolivia is in
many ways still the same country -- far more than the United States today
is the country of Valley Forge. Bolivia is still small, poor, and rural,
with an indigenous majority working the land and cleaning the houses of a
light-skinned, Spanish-speaking elite. When indigenous groups blockade the
roads into Bolivia's cities to protest government policy, they recall Tupac
Katari's siege in 1781.

The cocaleros have drawn much of their electoral success from a close
association with the Indian peasant unions. Morales, who was born in an
impoverished village and speaks Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, migrated from
the cold Andean highlands to the hot lowlands where coca grows, to seek his
fortune -- the story of many cocaleros. His brother stayed behind and leads
a highland farmers' union.

The cocalero movement has a broader appeal than the Kataristas: It preaches
a populist message of anti-globalization as well as the Kataristas' ethnic
pride. In the last week it has led nationwide protests against a government
plan to export natural gas via a multinational company. But the defense of
the Andean coca leaf is at the heart of its successful politics.

During Tupac Katari's uprising, insurgents crammed coca leaves in the
mouths of Spanish speakers and forced them to chew, humiliating those who
saw in coca a symbol of native people's inferiority. There is something of
the same defiance in the cocalero movement today. On the floor of congress,
their representatives often give speeches in native languages and chew
coca. Whether American diplomats and elite politicians like it or not,
they've reclaimed the stigmatized coca leaf as a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Mumford is a graduate student in Latin American history at Yale
University.