So much for the war against drugs. While the DEA has successfully targeted top traficantes, the drug business has continued to flourish at the grass roots. The Bolivian economy is addicted to coca, which provides 350,000 jobs at home-and accounts for 35 percent of the world’s output. Two thirds of that crop comes from the Chapare, where the DEA is considered the Devil himself. At a recent gathering, campesinos charged that Bolivian police steal their coca only to sell it to traffickers themselves and accused Americans of destroying their means of livelihood by dynamiting roads used to bring their crops to market.
In a cruel twist, the aggressive tactics have expanded the drug trade, not eliminated it. The problem is that the governments moved ahead with interdiction and eradication plans without developing alternative crops and markets. Last year a successful campaign pushed the coca price down from $45 per 100pound bag to $5. The price drop lured some coca growers out of the drug trade but, because there weren’t viable farming alternatives, the program ended up pushing many peasants into the more lucrative business of paste and base production.
The eradication plan has also proved a path to downward mobility for Chapare coca growers-provided they don’t take the money and run. For the past two years the Bolivian government, bankrolled by the United States, has offered peasants $2,000 per hectare to eradicate their coca crops. Many growers just destroyed their worst plants, collected the money and replanted farther in the jungle. To qualify for $22 million in U.S. aid, the Bolivian government has resorted to forced eradication for the first time-a policy that, according to economist Jose Antonio Quiroga, “creates poles of resistance.” Many peasants have formed self-defense committees to repel forced eradication in their areas.
The Americans and Bolivians have scored several recent blows against coca. Not long ago an anti-narcotics team combed the dense foliage of the Chapare. Two bursts of gunfire from deep in the jungle alerted coca workers they had company. Despite the warning shots, a 16-year-old-his feet marked with the acid welts of the pisadores who stamp coca into paste-got caught in the dragnet. A Bolivian cop offered him $1,000 for information about the paste pits-and casually pointed a rifle at his feet as an added incentive. The teenager led the police to a paste lab wedged into a steep ravine. After torching the facility, the police sent their informant home empty-handed: they never intended to pay him, or even put him in jail. No matter. Assuming the narcos don’t punish him for snitching, it won’t be long before he lands another job in Bolivia’s thriving coca economy.
