In Rio Blanco, a village perched on a mountainside overlooking a picturesque, tropical valley in Bolivia’s Yungas region, Crisologo Mendoza’s family have harvested coca since before he was born.
“My great-grandparents were coca farmers,” he said, nursing a hangover from the last nights’ festivities celebrating the town’s anniversary.
“Ever since we lived here, this is our work…. We’d pull out the big leaves, lay them out flat to dry, pack them up into fifty-pound packages like this, and ship them to Argentina. It was so expensive in Argentina that they’d serve you a plate with only three or four leaves on it, like a dessert. That’s how expensive it was.”
Coca is a luxury product because although Argentina legalised coca in 1989 after the fall of the military junta, paradoxically, importing it remains illegal – as it is everywhere else. While this has benefitted some of Bolivia’s cocaleros (coca farmers), it has reinforced a deep stigma against the plant – sacred for native cultures, but vilified as the raw material for cocaine.
The disappointing WHO review
This year, there was a glimmer of hope with the possible change of coca’s legal status. Bolivia and Colombia had initiated a review process of its legal status with the World Health Organisation. Coca is currently listed as a Schedule I substance, on par with fentanyl and cocaine. The hope was that its rescheduling, or even complete de-scheduling, could mean a new chapter for the leaf’s future.
A few weeks ago, this dream was dashed. After two years of deliberation, the WHO recommended that the leaf’s ban remain. The main reason was because they couldn’t see coca as anything else beyond the key ingredient for cocaine – the drug that’s been on the UN’s bounty list for eradication since its inception.
“The idea that legalising coca would lead to more cocaine does not really make sense – given that current cocaine production can satisfy global demand several times over,” anthropologist Thomas Grisaffi told TalkingDrugs.
“This decision is a slap in the face of indigenous peoples and the drug policy reform movement,” reacted Martin Jelsma, who’s followed the proceedings for the Transnational Institute (TNI).
“It has shown that the drug control regime is unable to align with human rights, including indigenous rights, to decolonise and modernise.”
Coca has been part of indigenous South American culture for millennia – mainly in the Andes mountains as well as parts of the Amazon rainforest, traditionally chewed (or more accurately, sucked) for its invigorating effects, and offered as a tribute to the gods.
Cocaine’s rapid popularity from the 1970s cemented the leaf’s identity to that disco powder. Powerful cocaine cartels formed across Latin America. In Bolivia, a 1980 military coup installed General Luis García Meza into power, financed by coke baron Roberto Suárez, a partner of Pablo Escobar. Recently unearthed documents show the CIA knew of the general’s dodgy dealings, but didn’t terribly mind as García Meza was helping in the good fight against communism.
Another American three-letter agency, the DEA, was interested in Bolivia, too. From the late ‘80s to the mid-2000s, conflict rumbled through the Bolivian countryside, as DEA-backed drug squads committed abuses against native villagers and clashed with mobs of angry peasants. This continued until 2004, when then-president Carlos Mesa, confronted by mass protests across the country, compromised with the cocaleros. The “community control” system was born, remaining in effect to this day.
A new system
Under this system, coca-farming households are allowed a patch of up to 1,600 square meters on which to grow coca, which is closely monitored by their local union. Surpassing this limit means crop destruction and a one-year cultivation ban.
The next president, Evo Morales, himself an indigenous cocalero from the Chapare region, booted out the DEA and doubled farmers’ coca cultivation quotas.
Morales even managed to win Bolivia an exception to the UN drug treaties regarding coca by withdrawing from the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 2011, only returning two years later with a reservation: that his country not be challenged in producing, trading and consuming coca within its own borders. Despite opposition from the US and other developed countries, the UN agreed.
“Thanks to Evo, we have completely changed the mindset in the country,” Mendoza proudly told TalkingDrugs, who as a union leader took part in the cocalero protests.
“I like that each one of us Bolivians, values our identity, our culture, our work. Otherwise, we’re just puppets.”
A Bolivian-shaped exception
But the Bolivian system is unlikely to be replicated in other countries, at least for now. Firstly, as Grisaffi points out, the cocalero unions in Bolivia are powerful entities, capable of influencing elections and getting Morales into power. While there are likeminded organisations in both Peru and Colombia, they don’t enjoy nearly the same leverage. Secondly, though there is an indigenous coca culture in Colombia, the vast majority is grown for the cocaine business.
“I’m not sure that a social control coca leaf market could really cover the coca leaf production that happens in countries like Colombia,” said Zara Snapp, co-founder and director of Instituto RIA in Mexico City.
“There’s lots of possible complications because there just isn’t a huge domestic market for it.”
This means that global prohibition must end for Peruvian and Colombian cocaleros to truly go legit. The WHO’s decision has set those hopes back.
“I think there was little to no recognition or interest in really putting indigenous rights at the centre,” added Snapp.
The future of coca and cocaleros
So what does this rejection mean for the future of coca reform?
“Countries and indigenous peoples will have to find other ways to reclaim their rights, which could mean organised defections from the treaty regime that has once again shown it is frozen in time,” said Jelsma.
Other than quitting these international treaties entirely, another less drastic option could be bilateral treaties between countries. Snapp explained that Colombia could pass a law allowing for coca products to be exported to another open-minded country, so long as they too passed a law allowing for imports.
But Grisaffi argues that in a sense, coca’s global ban has actually helped farmers.
“There is a reason they grow coca and not coffee: coffee has a low price. Coca would too, if it was legalised, as production would expand. The failure of ‘alternative development’ in most coca growing contexts is that it seeks to further integrate peasant farmers into global markets that are rigged against them,” he explained.
“Bolivia’s coca growers live in a land locked country, in a region with a limited road network, few bridges, and limited domestic markets. In this context, growing coca is a rational choice, it has a high value and there are guaranteed markets. If coca was legalized, then some of those advantages would disappear.”
Mendoza, meanwhile, is wary of worldwide legalisation being hijacked by the free market.
“Well, it will be good if they would totally decriminalise coca, so it could be free in all countries, but there could be excess production, and that can affect us, the producers,” he explained.
“For us, it would be good if there was a limit, so that they don’t make more.”
Other developments threaten the future of coca. In November, Bolivia’s new centrist president, Rodrigo Paz, ominously welcomed back the DEA. This follows several high-profile scandals in the past year or two, in which top counternarcotics chiefs were arrested for abetting drug smuggling and in one case, actually had a cocaine lab on their property. The Paz administration has singled out the Chapare as a hotbed of narcotrafficking, adding to an already tense situation as Evo Morales, having fallen out with his own party, hides in his Chapare stronghold from charges of statutory rape, which he claims are politically-motivated. His followers among the powerful local coca-growers union have vowed to wage guerilla warfare to protect him.
“Some coca growers are realists,” stated Grisaffi. “They have already sold their land. They know that if the DEA enter the country, then crop eradication might well start again.”
“Trump’s aggressive re-launch of the military war on drugs bodes nothing but disaster,” added Jelsma. “Strategies that have failed for decades, are not suddenly going to work now by shooting more bullets and killing more people.”
Additional reporting by William Wroblewski.
