Pubdate: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 Source: Guardian Weekly, The (UK) Copyright: Guardian Publications 2000 Contact: 75 Farringdon Road London U.K EC1M 3HQ Fax: 44-171-242-0985 Website: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/GWeekly/front/ Page: 22 -- "FEATURES" Author: Nick Thorpe CAUGHT IN THE EYE OF THE LEAF STORM For the people of Bolivia coca is a sacred plant, a traditional medicine and source of income. For the U.S. government it is evil, to be eradicated at any cost. Nick Thorpe reports on the conflict between the two. Zenon Cruz bites another coca leaf from its stem, tongues it into the wad already bulging in his cheek and scowls up at the army helicopter hovering above the jungle canopy. "My father sowed coca and his father sowed it before him," mutters the peasant farmer, his teeth stained green. "What the Americans do not understand is that this leaf is a gift from mother earth to our people, an ancient tradition. They do not understand its sacredness. They think it is all about drugs." Like most of the campesinos gathered at this roadside protest in the tropical Chapare region of Bolivia, the 29-year-old Cruz has watched a United States-backed eradication squad hack away his entire crop and his main source of income. Last year alone, the soldiers destroyed a record 17,000 hectares in the region, and by the end of this year aim to finish off the remaining 3,000 hectares, in a drive to strangle the US drugs problem at source. The Bolivian government, with huge funding incentives from Washington (it must be seen to be meeting drug eradication targets to qualify for development aid), calls the strategy Operation Dignity. Cruz and his struggling fellow farmers call it cultural genocide. Andean peoples were using this hardy plant for a variety of ritual and health purposes for thousands of years before white men first learned to extract cocaine from it. Rich in vitamins and minerals, the leaves have traditionally been used to treat ailments ranging from dysentery to altitude sickness. The vast majority of Bolivians still chew them daily, mixing them with ash to create an anaesthetic effect on the stomach to ward off hunger. Death, marriage and any other social or religious ritual here will include an offering of coca. "Guard its leaves with love," warns Legend Of Coca, the 800-year-old oral poem. "And when you feel pain in your heart, hunger in your flesh and darkness in your mind, lift it to your mouth. You will find love for your pain, nourishment for your body and light for your mind." But the seers also foretold that the white man would find a way to subvert their "small but strong" plant: "If your oppressor arrives from the north, the white conqueror, the gold seeker, when he touches it he will find only poison for his body and madness for the mind." What the seers did not predict was the scale of the backlash. The white man duly succeeded in extracting the 6.5% alkaloid cocaine from the coca leaf at the end of the 19th century Dr Sigmund Freud become the first to contract nasal cancer from snorting it - and all hell broke loose. Eradication attempts began in 1949 after a study by a North American banker, Howard Fonda, claimed that the chewing of the plant was responsible for mental deficiency and poverty in Andean countries." In 1961 the United Nations placed coca on schedule one, branding it one of the most dangerous and restricted drugs. Of course this had no effect on US cocaine use, as executives snorted lines while the ghettos opted for its cheaper and more dangerous relative, crack. By the 80s more than half the world's cocaine was being consumed by the US, which has 5% of the global population. Bolivia, one of the world's poorest nations, saw an opening in the market and filled it. It was to become the world's second-largest producer of coca and cocaine paste. Now, under the concerted eradication initiated by Ronald Reagan in his war on drugs, it is payback time. Bolivia is being punished for its recent complicity with the destruction of its ancient culture. Not without a fight, however. "Go home, Yankees!" shouts a furious Quechua woman in a bright shawl and bowler hat, marching with hundreds of others under banners calling for farmers' human rights to be respected. The helicopter keeps its distance, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration officials rarely show their faces outside the confines of the nearby army base. Zenon Cruz denies supplying the drug barons with his coca, but admits there were plenty who did. At the height, of the trade light aircraft landed regularly on these roads to pick up consignments. "But they are punishing us all - legal and illegal together --and everyone is struggling," he says. Coca, a hardy plant ideally suited to tired or eroded soil, could produce three or-four harvests a year. Now forced to grow beans and oranges instead, as part of a US-funded "alternative development" plan, Cruz must feed his family on a fraction of his former income. "You can fill a lorry with oranges and not sell any of them at market but coca always sells like hot bread," he says. "I was making 150 bolivianos [about $35] a week before they cut down the coca. Now we sometimes struggle to make 20. How can you feed a family on that?" Anti-drugs police estimate that the little more than three tonnes of cocaine pasta base will leave Chapare this year, but this alone will generate $4m, thanks to a 300% price increase over the past three years. Critics of the eradication policy argue that it will simply drive producers further into the Bolivian Amazon region, or elsewhere in South America where an estimated 6.5m square kilometres lie ripe for production. "It's simply the law of supply and demand" says Kathryn Ledebur, coordinator of the Andean Information Network, a human rights watchdog publicising problems with the eradication effort. "It's pointless trying to stop production in the producer countries - the place to fight it is where the market is." The bigger picture is indeed discouraging. While Bolivia has fallen from second-to third-largest cocaine exporter behind Colombia and Peru, there has been almost no reduction in the amount of cocaine exported to the US and Europe, according to the annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board. The explanation is that production has increased in Brazil and Colombia, where the governments have little control over their tropical territories. "It's an obvious case of the balloon theory in operation," says Ledebur, who is an American. "You squeeze it in one place and it'll just expand in another unless you tackle root demand. Instead we've got a war focused on the poor people, and it is not working." "The child in the US learns that he must buy things in order to be happy, whether it's Nike trainers or a gram of cocaine," says Javier Castro, curator of the Bolivia Coca Museum in La Paz. "That's the root of the problem, and everyone knows if they can't get their drugs here, they will just go somewhere else. In the meantime they want to wipe out coca completely - it's a kind of cultural genocide. It's going to be as if we have no soul, no spirit:' Castro is one of many who have fought to have the coca leaf recognised as a health product rather than a schedule one drug. Western backpackers here drink coca tea constantly to ward off altitude sickness, and a Harvard University study found that 100g of Bolivian coca more than satisfied the recommended daily allowances of calcium, iron, phosphorus, vitamin A and riboflavin. Contrary to popular belief, the burst of energy it gives comes not from the 0.5% cocaine content - this is in fact destroyed by saliva in the digestive tract, which is why cocaine users must snort or inject - but from its conversion of carbohydrates into glucose, and its stimulation of the respiratory system, With at least 30 coca products already available in Bolivia, ranging from toothpaste to pick-me-up pastilles, campaigners argue that there is considerable potential for salvaging the livelihoods of many thousands of poor farmers by marketing the plant in the West. But the only company that has managed to get round the ban is the Stepan company of the US. In one of the howling ironies of the coca war, it legally imports 175,000kg of Chapare coca each year to make, among other things, a de-cocainised flavouring for Coca-Cola. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart