[lbo-talk] Coca culture & current rioting in Bolivia

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Oct 15 01:37:56 PDT 2003


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/opinion/15ZURI.html

New York Times October 15, 2003

Coca Culture

By LEONIDA ZURITA-VARGAS

O CHABAMBA, Bolivia There has been rioting in Bolivia for nearly four

weeks now. News reports say that the riots have been over the

construction of a pipeline to ship natural gas to the United States.

That's true, but there's a deeper anger at work: anger toward the

United States and its war against a traditional Bolivian crop, coca.

You see, because of the American drug problem, we can no longer grow

coca, which was part of our life and our culture long before the

United States was a country. This is why many of the people protesting

in La Paz and other cities are peasants whose families have cultivated

coca for generations.

My tribe, the Quechua, comes from the lowland jungles of the Chapare

in central Bolivia. We are used to chewing coca leaves every day, much

as Americans drink coffee. We sustained ourselves by growing coca for

chewing and for products like shampoo, medicinal teas and toothpaste.

We did not turn coca into cocaine; the chemicals needed for that are

made in countries like the United States. Bolivia now allows us to

grow a very small amount of coca, but it is not enough.

I am a cocalera. I owe my life to coca. My father died when I was 2

and my mother raised six children by growing coca. I was a farmer

myself, growing coca for traditional purposes. But the United States

says it is better for us to just forget about coca. In the early

1990's, Bolivian officials distributed American money $300 to $2,500

per farm and told us to try yucca and pineapples. But 60 pineapples

earn us only about eight bolivianos (about $1). And unlike coca, yucca

and pineapples are difficult to carry to the cities to sell, and they

spoil. So many farmers returned to growing coca.

Then in 1998, the Bolivian government announced it would eradicate

coca farms through a military program financed by the Americans.

Soldiers came to the Chapare and destroyed our coca crops with

machetes. School teachers were beaten, and some houses were burned

down.

When I saw that, I couldn't be quiet. I helped to organize people

village by village, and I became leader of a national association of

peasant women. Eventually we were joined in our protests by other

social movements and unions. We have continued to grow. Evo Morales,

the head of the national coca growers' union, even came in second in

the 2002 presidential election. He got 21 percent of the vote, while

the current president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, got 22 percent.

I think Mr. Morales would win today. Bolivians have grown tired of Mr.

Sánchez de Lozada's free-market, pro-United States policies, which

have not lowered our high rate of unemployment. The president's

willingness to build a pipeline through Chile to export our natural

gas to the United States has made many more people join the

anti-government protests the cocaleros started.

To me, real success in the war on drugs would be to capture and

prosecute the big drug traffickers, and for the United States to stop

its own citizens from using drugs. The war on the cocaleros has

brought Bolivia nothing but poverty and death.

Now tanks surround the presidential palace in La Paz. Fourteen people

died in riots there on Monday alone. Unless the United States and its

allies like Mr. Sánchez de Lozada stop their war against us, Bolivia

will have neither peace nor a future.

Leonida Zurita-Vargas is secretary general of Bartolina Sisa, an

association of peasant women. This article was written with Maria

Cristina Caballero, a Colombian journalist and fellow at Harvard's

Center for Public Leadership.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company



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