Bolivia - small coca grower with big ambitions

Sep 14, 2009, 15:40 GMT

La Paz - Many villagers in Bolivia's central Cochabamba province live off the production of coca leaves, which are used to produce cocaine.

Residents of the villages of Villa Tunari, Chimore, Shinahota, Villa 14 de Septiembre and San Francisco - who number about 100,000 - are known as 'cocaleros.'

One of them, Evo Morales, is now the country's president after rising from anonymity as a leader of coca leaf growers.

With its coca leaves used in about 13 per cent of the world's refined cocaine, Bolivia is the third-largest grower after Colombia and Peru.

While its place in the more than 70-billion-dollar illicit global cocaine trade may be small, Bolivia provides a textbook case of what international drug fighters are trying to prevent: A creeping expansion in coca leaf hectarage for export, accompanied by expanding abuse of the drug at home.

Unlike in Colombia, the coca crop is used traditionally in Bolivia and Peru, where it has an ancient history. For high altitude dwellers of the Andes, the leaf when chewed or brewed into tea acts as a palliative and stimulant, and a certain amount of cultivation is allowed for local use.

But a good part of Bolivia's coca leaf production - about 104 metric tonnes in 2007 - is diverted to the manufacture of the illegal drug in Colombia, Peru and increasingly, Bolivia itself. The United States consumed nearly half of 2007 world production of 994 metric tons, while a little less than that is consumed in Europe.

This year, Morales asked his faithful 'cocalero' supporters to 'combat drug trafficking through social control, in an organized fashion.'

That meant they were to respect the 'c'ato' - the surface that every Bolivian household is allowed to devote to coca leaves for personal use. For the whole country, that amounts to about 12,000 hectares.

Still, Bolivia now produces more coca for drug gangs than it used to, with an estimated total of 30,000 hectares under cultivation in 2008, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported in its 2009 annual report. The number represented a 5-per-cent expansion from 2007, while Peru's acreage had increased 4 per cent.

Both upward trends were countermanded by Colombia's 18-per-cent crop decline over the same period.

The leftist populist Morales is engaged in flagrant combat with the international community over his country's 5,000-year-old coca leaf tradition.

Earlier this year, he chewed a coca leaf at a United Nations drug conference in Vienna. And in 2008, government officials participated in a 'chew-in' to protest the UN's request that Bolivians stop chewing the leaf.

Morales has, however, carried out a crackdown on illicit drugs, as police seized some 25 tonnes of cocaine in 2008 alone.

In November 2008, Morales expelled officials of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), accusing them of spying and providing financial support to Bolivia's conservative opposition.

But still he demanded that the US government hand over resources for the task of eliminating the illegal crop.

The Bolivian government is set to devote some 16 million dollars to the fight against drugs this year, according to the country's anti-drugs chief Felipe Caceres - a small amount when compared to the 26 million dollars the DEA contributed from September 2007 to November 2008.

The US agency provided uniforms, weapons and logistical backing for Umopar - Bolivia's anti-drugs force - as well as helicopters and Zodiac boats.

Morales has since turned to Brazil, and more recently to Russia and France, in search of helicopters for his anti-drug force.

The Andean country's anti-drug force also intends to dismantle the trafficking networks that are active in Bolivia's main cities.

El Alto, next to La Paz, has become a key site for cocaine processed in Peru to the north, intended for distribution to Chile, Argentina and Brazil. Scores of tiny clandestine operations have been uncovered in rooms barely 4 square metres in size.

'Every day in La Paz and El Alto we arrest people who are active in small-scale dealing and now we want to neutralize networks involving Peruvians and Bolivians,' said Israel Vega, the regional director of the anti-drugs force.

The government says it eliminated more than 5,000 hectares of illegal coca leaf crops in 2008.

Nonetheless, Caceres confirmed that new plantations were thriving in the off-limits Madidi ecological park, in the north of the La Paz region, as well as in other nature reserves.