One thing about chewing coca leaves that is weird to the neophyte is their specific, sylvan kind of taste. Unlike the chemical stain that cocaine burns on the back of the throat, coca can seem like a hippie cleanse for the mouth. To start, there is the inescapable fibrousness; even with some dexterous tongue and tooth work, little twig-like stems end up pressed against the inside of the cheek or stabbing at the gums. Then there is the flavor, a musty piquancy of autumn leaves suffused with a tannic tang. The effect is slightly astringent. Chewing is generally a misnomer, since coca is piled up into a wad on one side of the mouth and sucked on, but some people gnash at the lanceolate leaves until tiny green specks garnish the teeth like dried parsley.
When a person chews coca, a cocktail of compounds is secreted from the leaves and absorbed into the body. This contains dozens of alkaloids that include the cocaine compound, and it has mild psychotropic effects in its unprocessed form. Its processed form, obviously, is a different matter. People from Andean countries like to say that coca’s relationship to cocaine is like the grape to wine. The equivalence isn’t totally precise, but coca is a centerpiece in traditional ceremonies and has the status of a sacred substance and so it enjoys, like the Holy Eucharist, a certain factual leniency.
Of course, neither its natural consumption nor its spiritual status has saved the coca plant from becoming a harbinger of bloodshed. Coca garnered its peculiar status when a German graduate student isolated a pure form of its electrifying alkaloid from a fresh shipment of leaves in 1859 using alcohol, sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate and ether. Cocaine’s global market is now worth around 80 billion dollars per year. It is also illicit. An untold number of people have been killed for having some connection, tenuous or not, to the trade. Drug-related violence has made parts of Latin America among the most dangerous places on the planet.
Nowhere has coca been more important than in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country. Though its governments have traditionally toed the line of U.S. foreign policy on drugs since at least the 1980s, Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, threw out the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) nearly a decade ago while vowing to resuscitate coca’s sullied reputation. “Coca,” Morales has said so often that the phrase could be printed on the currency, “is not cocaine.” After decades of sweaty counter-narcotics operations, during which U.S.-trained soldiers scoured the jungle uprooting coca bushes and Americans and Europeans snorted cocaine anyway, Morales called a stop to eradication campaigns in his country. Instead, the cocaleros of Bolivia have cultivated the conviction that they can spread the gospel of coca. “Our philosophy is clear,” the country’s leading anti-drug official, Sabino Mendoza, told me. “Coca should be consumed, in its natural state.” To that end, the Bolivian government has spent millions of dollars and put forward a law to support its coca market. It has shunned the War on Drugs and sought instead to create alternate markets for coca leaf by supporting industrialization. Teas, shampoos, wines, cakes, liquors, flour, toothpastes, energy drinks and candies that feature the leaf have been produced, some in government-backed factories.
It sometimes seems like Bolivians will market anything that contains their quasi-magical plant. Anything that could lure investors. Anything that could trade internationally. Anything, anything but cocaine. (...)
At Rivero’s factory, where he produces soda concentrate, he offered me some of the finished, neon-green liquid product in a glass to try. It tasted like coca’s distant cousin, just arrived from Miami smacking bubble gum and raving about party yachts. Sweet, bubbly; the unmistakable descendant of Red Bull. I drank it quickly, and recognized an afternote redolent of coca’s tang. “Coca has one bad alkaloid, which is cocaine, and the rest of its alkaloids are good,” Rivero said. (The white powder cocaine is usually the cocaine alkaloid isolated in hydrochloride salt form, occasionally cut with other substances.) “We are sure that our product does not contain a single bad alkaloid. We want to show Bolivia and the world that it’s possible to make appealing derivatives that can be consumed and don’t cause addiction.” (...)
In July 2017, I travelled to the Chapare, a tropical province north of Cochabamba and one of Bolivia’s two major coca-growing regions, to meet Rivero’s outreach team. The road from the highlands down to the rainforest river basin traces its way along mountain saddles overhung with clouds and neon panicles of lobster claw flowers. It is also punctuated by checkpoints. Just a few decades ago, growing coca in the Chapare was prohibited. The area became ground zero in the U.S. War on Drugs. Interdiction forces conducted merciless campaigns against coca growers, who still bitterly resent the authors of their suffering.
I was going to the annual coca fair, where Coca Real was making a pitch, held just up the road from a mirrored glass-plated factory that was built to produce coca products. Flanked on all sides by the hyper-green rainforest, the fair stalls created haphazard corridors where revelers wandered, their cheeks bulging with coca. One vendor, selling frosting-smeared cupcakes topped with decorative coca leaf, told me that she had experimented for months to get the flavor right–there can’t be too much coca, she said, or the cake turns bitter. A man hawked coca shampoo as a cure for hair loss.
Nowhere in Bolivia has the impact of President Evo Morales’s 2005 election been felt more dramatically than the Chapare, where his activism leading one of the major coca unions thrust him into the national political spotlight and ultimately carried him to electoral victory thirteen years ago. Morales, who is the country’s first indigenous president and who was raised in poverty in the highlands before moving to the Chapare as a young man, has remained loyal to his base. Duly, he had promised to make an appearance at the fair. On the day of his scheduled arrival, farmers stood in their mud-splattered shoes and Sunday shirts with eyes turned skyward waiting for a sign of his helicopter.
Morales has increasingly become a subject of controversy in Bolivia, ever more with his recent efforts to massage the constitution to extend his long tenure in the presidential palace. But in the Chapare, support for him is unflagging. Asterio Romero, Morales’s friend and union colleague and currently the mayor of one of the region’s largest cities, told me he believed Morales was sent by God. That, he said, was the only explanation for Morales’s famous work ethic–the president sleeps little, and has been known to call ministers to the palace for meetings at 5 o’clock in the morning. To the people of the Chapare, he also represents someone who understands the pain of the drug war years.
For Morales, the piecemeal documentation of atrocities committed in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of eradicating coca plants is not jarring. He was there for clashes that produced albums filled with grainy photos of men and women with lash-like bruises and gaping bullet wounds, undergoing emergency outdoor surgeries or building barricades to block police trucks; the medical certificates of hematomas, contusions, puncture wounds and edemas; the autopsy reports documenting bullet trajectories. One report from 2008, published by Bolivian government agencies, in which Morales says he was tortured during his many detentions by anti-narcotics squads, includes photographs of the president himself. In them, he has the same mop-top haircut, but his face has the sheen of youth, and he is propped on a medical examining table with purple lesions crisscrossing his back and snaking over his shoulder.
By the time the report was published, Morales had been elected to his first presidential term, and he would with short shrift expel the U.S. Ambassador and the DEA from the country. Although many of the boots-on-the-ground anti-narcotics campaigns were carried out by special Bolivia police and military forces like UMOPAR, the Chapare was one of the first places where the DEA began its foreign War on Drugs operations, and many Bolivians still hold the U.S. responsible for the squads’ violence and corruption. “From the U.S., they made the DEA pressure us at gunpoint and with gas,” a coca union leader named Isidora Coronado told me. “It was a difficult time. A lot of women, especially, were traumatized; there were assaults, and the men in uniform could do whatever they wanted. But from the moment [Morales] became president we haven’t had those kinds of clashes anymore.”
If anything, the coca fair was celebration of the victories won, and by extension, each artisanal coca product on offer seemed a small tribute to the struggle (Coca Real’s stand, with its flashy cardboard cutout of a life-sized bottle, was nearly alone in its unabashedly commercial design). Wherever Morales goes, he is greeted by garlands of flowers; shortly after his helicopter landed on the afternoon of the fair and he emerged from a black SUV among a flock of bodyguards, Morales was garlanded with coca leaves and presented with a shamrock-colored cake made from ground leaves and varnished with white icing. Farmers with pleated skirts and long braids presented him with baskets of guava and sweet potatoes. He spoke for 15 minutes, praising the new coca policies and promising more industrialization. To finish his speech, he chanted a famous slogan in Quechua, joined by hundreds of voices: “Kawsachun coca! Huañuchun Yanquis!” Long live coca. Down with the Yankees.
About 17 million people around the world used cocaine at some point in 2015, according to the latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). A third of those people were in North America. While the DEA estimates that cocaine use is increasing in the U.S., most of its field divisions don’t consider the drug to be as urgent a threat as other controlled substances. Cocaine-related deaths have spiked, but this is largely due to a fad of speedballing it with fentanyl. In any case, the agency’s laboratory analyses conclude that 92 percent of cocaine in the U.S. market originated in Colombia and six percent in Peru–two countries where American interdiction programs are still robustly in place.
Bolivia, however, has been singled out by the U.S. government as being a special pain in the ass. Its truculence has earned it repeat mention on the White House’s annual presidential memorandum on illicit drug producing countries, where it is rebuked for having “failed demonstrably” to adequately enact counternarcotics policies. Since it’s an illegal market, drug production can only be measured by proxy, and so the UNODC calculates the number of hectares of coca cultivated using satellite and aerial imagery to guess at the amount of cocaine produced (it also looks at police seizures of finished cocaine and of the intermediary butter-like paste product). Its most recent data for the three major coca producing countries put cultivation at 146,000 hectares in Colombia, 43,900 in Peru, and 23,100 in Bolivia. The U.S. Department of State disagrees with the methodology and says there are more hectares in cultivation, though still less than in Colombia or Peru. But in September’s memo, the White House exempted Colombia, reasoning that its police and army are close security allies.
Bolivia is something else entirely.
by Jessica Camille Aguirre, Guernica | Read more:
Image: Ansellia Kulikku
When a person chews coca, a cocktail of compounds is secreted from the leaves and absorbed into the body. This contains dozens of alkaloids that include the cocaine compound, and it has mild psychotropic effects in its unprocessed form. Its processed form, obviously, is a different matter. People from Andean countries like to say that coca’s relationship to cocaine is like the grape to wine. The equivalence isn’t totally precise, but coca is a centerpiece in traditional ceremonies and has the status of a sacred substance and so it enjoys, like the Holy Eucharist, a certain factual leniency.
Of course, neither its natural consumption nor its spiritual status has saved the coca plant from becoming a harbinger of bloodshed. Coca garnered its peculiar status when a German graduate student isolated a pure form of its electrifying alkaloid from a fresh shipment of leaves in 1859 using alcohol, sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate and ether. Cocaine’s global market is now worth around 80 billion dollars per year. It is also illicit. An untold number of people have been killed for having some connection, tenuous or not, to the trade. Drug-related violence has made parts of Latin America among the most dangerous places on the planet.Nowhere has coca been more important than in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country. Though its governments have traditionally toed the line of U.S. foreign policy on drugs since at least the 1980s, Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, threw out the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) nearly a decade ago while vowing to resuscitate coca’s sullied reputation. “Coca,” Morales has said so often that the phrase could be printed on the currency, “is not cocaine.” After decades of sweaty counter-narcotics operations, during which U.S.-trained soldiers scoured the jungle uprooting coca bushes and Americans and Europeans snorted cocaine anyway, Morales called a stop to eradication campaigns in his country. Instead, the cocaleros of Bolivia have cultivated the conviction that they can spread the gospel of coca. “Our philosophy is clear,” the country’s leading anti-drug official, Sabino Mendoza, told me. “Coca should be consumed, in its natural state.” To that end, the Bolivian government has spent millions of dollars and put forward a law to support its coca market. It has shunned the War on Drugs and sought instead to create alternate markets for coca leaf by supporting industrialization. Teas, shampoos, wines, cakes, liquors, flour, toothpastes, energy drinks and candies that feature the leaf have been produced, some in government-backed factories.
It sometimes seems like Bolivians will market anything that contains their quasi-magical plant. Anything that could lure investors. Anything that could trade internationally. Anything, anything but cocaine. (...)
Coca, especially in the highlands, enjoys near panacea status. It had deep ties to indigenous culture, and the 30 percent of Bolivians who chew it regularly believe that it can alleviate most ills. In the new and growing coca product market, this tonic-like reputation is its most marketable aspect. “With Coca Real, it’s just the same,” one of Bolivia’s rising coca entrepreneurs, Juan Manuel Rivero, told me, referring to his flagship product, a carbonated energy drink containing coca extract. “A healthy beverage that will effectively combat sorojchi, alleviate exhaustion, and eliminate physical or mental fatigue.” Rivero is one of a dozen or so entrepreneurs who have obtained permission from the government to purchase coca for industrial development. While it’s not illegal to have coca in Bolivia, there is a limit on the amount that can be transported without a permit, and the movement of leaves is closely monitored. His Coca Real drink is one of the products that have entered the market seeking to capitalize on a sympathetic regime and shifting global attitudes about regulating certain kinds of substances.
At Rivero’s factory, where he produces soda concentrate, he offered me some of the finished, neon-green liquid product in a glass to try. It tasted like coca’s distant cousin, just arrived from Miami smacking bubble gum and raving about party yachts. Sweet, bubbly; the unmistakable descendant of Red Bull. I drank it quickly, and recognized an afternote redolent of coca’s tang. “Coca has one bad alkaloid, which is cocaine, and the rest of its alkaloids are good,” Rivero said. (The white powder cocaine is usually the cocaine alkaloid isolated in hydrochloride salt form, occasionally cut with other substances.) “We are sure that our product does not contain a single bad alkaloid. We want to show Bolivia and the world that it’s possible to make appealing derivatives that can be consumed and don’t cause addiction.” (...)
I was going to the annual coca fair, where Coca Real was making a pitch, held just up the road from a mirrored glass-plated factory that was built to produce coca products. Flanked on all sides by the hyper-green rainforest, the fair stalls created haphazard corridors where revelers wandered, their cheeks bulging with coca. One vendor, selling frosting-smeared cupcakes topped with decorative coca leaf, told me that she had experimented for months to get the flavor right–there can’t be too much coca, she said, or the cake turns bitter. A man hawked coca shampoo as a cure for hair loss.
Nowhere in Bolivia has the impact of President Evo Morales’s 2005 election been felt more dramatically than the Chapare, where his activism leading one of the major coca unions thrust him into the national political spotlight and ultimately carried him to electoral victory thirteen years ago. Morales, who is the country’s first indigenous president and who was raised in poverty in the highlands before moving to the Chapare as a young man, has remained loyal to his base. Duly, he had promised to make an appearance at the fair. On the day of his scheduled arrival, farmers stood in their mud-splattered shoes and Sunday shirts with eyes turned skyward waiting for a sign of his helicopter.
Morales has increasingly become a subject of controversy in Bolivia, ever more with his recent efforts to massage the constitution to extend his long tenure in the presidential palace. But in the Chapare, support for him is unflagging. Asterio Romero, Morales’s friend and union colleague and currently the mayor of one of the region’s largest cities, told me he believed Morales was sent by God. That, he said, was the only explanation for Morales’s famous work ethic–the president sleeps little, and has been known to call ministers to the palace for meetings at 5 o’clock in the morning. To the people of the Chapare, he also represents someone who understands the pain of the drug war years.
For Morales, the piecemeal documentation of atrocities committed in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of eradicating coca plants is not jarring. He was there for clashes that produced albums filled with grainy photos of men and women with lash-like bruises and gaping bullet wounds, undergoing emergency outdoor surgeries or building barricades to block police trucks; the medical certificates of hematomas, contusions, puncture wounds and edemas; the autopsy reports documenting bullet trajectories. One report from 2008, published by Bolivian government agencies, in which Morales says he was tortured during his many detentions by anti-narcotics squads, includes photographs of the president himself. In them, he has the same mop-top haircut, but his face has the sheen of youth, and he is propped on a medical examining table with purple lesions crisscrossing his back and snaking over his shoulder.
By the time the report was published, Morales had been elected to his first presidential term, and he would with short shrift expel the U.S. Ambassador and the DEA from the country. Although many of the boots-on-the-ground anti-narcotics campaigns were carried out by special Bolivia police and military forces like UMOPAR, the Chapare was one of the first places where the DEA began its foreign War on Drugs operations, and many Bolivians still hold the U.S. responsible for the squads’ violence and corruption. “From the U.S., they made the DEA pressure us at gunpoint and with gas,” a coca union leader named Isidora Coronado told me. “It was a difficult time. A lot of women, especially, were traumatized; there were assaults, and the men in uniform could do whatever they wanted. But from the moment [Morales] became president we haven’t had those kinds of clashes anymore.”
If anything, the coca fair was celebration of the victories won, and by extension, each artisanal coca product on offer seemed a small tribute to the struggle (Coca Real’s stand, with its flashy cardboard cutout of a life-sized bottle, was nearly alone in its unabashedly commercial design). Wherever Morales goes, he is greeted by garlands of flowers; shortly after his helicopter landed on the afternoon of the fair and he emerged from a black SUV among a flock of bodyguards, Morales was garlanded with coca leaves and presented with a shamrock-colored cake made from ground leaves and varnished with white icing. Farmers with pleated skirts and long braids presented him with baskets of guava and sweet potatoes. He spoke for 15 minutes, praising the new coca policies and promising more industrialization. To finish his speech, he chanted a famous slogan in Quechua, joined by hundreds of voices: “Kawsachun coca! Huañuchun Yanquis!” Long live coca. Down with the Yankees.
About 17 million people around the world used cocaine at some point in 2015, according to the latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). A third of those people were in North America. While the DEA estimates that cocaine use is increasing in the U.S., most of its field divisions don’t consider the drug to be as urgent a threat as other controlled substances. Cocaine-related deaths have spiked, but this is largely due to a fad of speedballing it with fentanyl. In any case, the agency’s laboratory analyses conclude that 92 percent of cocaine in the U.S. market originated in Colombia and six percent in Peru–two countries where American interdiction programs are still robustly in place.
Bolivia, however, has been singled out by the U.S. government as being a special pain in the ass. Its truculence has earned it repeat mention on the White House’s annual presidential memorandum on illicit drug producing countries, where it is rebuked for having “failed demonstrably” to adequately enact counternarcotics policies. Since it’s an illegal market, drug production can only be measured by proxy, and so the UNODC calculates the number of hectares of coca cultivated using satellite and aerial imagery to guess at the amount of cocaine produced (it also looks at police seizures of finished cocaine and of the intermediary butter-like paste product). Its most recent data for the three major coca producing countries put cultivation at 146,000 hectares in Colombia, 43,900 in Peru, and 23,100 in Bolivia. The U.S. Department of State disagrees with the methodology and says there are more hectares in cultivation, though still less than in Colombia or Peru. But in September’s memo, the White House exempted Colombia, reasoning that its police and army are close security allies.
Bolivia is something else entirely.
by Jessica Camille Aguirre, Guernica | Read more:
Image: Ansellia Kulikku
