Home > Coca Culture
By LEONIDA ZURITA-VARGAS
Published: October 15, 2003
New York Times
OCHABAMBA, 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.