Coca – Andean Farmers and Globalization
By Zach Rubin
There is a plant that originates in some of the most remote parts of the
planet, but insidiously affects the developed world. From the most decadent parts
of high society in Beverly Hills to the ghettos of the Bronx it is available for
consumption to those who seek it. It is the coca plant, which grows in the high
mountains and slopes of the Andes mountains. It is practically a weed in its native
setting, and will grow there even under the harshest of conditions, which is why the
people of this area long ago began cultivating it for medicinal purposes. We can’t
know for sure, but it is thought that cultivation
began more than four thousand years ago when
farmers living in high altitudes discovered that the
leaf has the very real medicinal effect of combating
altitude sickness and staving off the pain of hunger
(Allen 2005). These effects alone don’t explain its
popularity among many areas of the United States,
where most of the population does not reside in the
Figure 1 - The Coca Plant
mountains and accordingly does not require a
reprieve from altitude sickness. Coca, as was discovered in the 19th century,
contains an alkaloid substance known as cocaine. In the small amounts available in
an individual or cluster of leaves, this substance acts as a moderate narcotic, akin to
smoking a cigarette. There are few known downsides, as there is no evidence of
bodily harm or addiction associated with naturally-occurring cocaine, as it makes up
less than one percent of the dry weight of the plant (Casale 1993). However, in large
doses not found in nature, one hundred percent refined cocaine from the coca plant
can create a euphoric high for that lasts hours but carries with it the risk of
permanent nerve damage and even death. It is in this form that the coca has found
its way into North America and beyond as a social blight. It has been tied to high
rates of crime and destructive behaviors in groups with high rates of consumption.
Because of this association it has been heavily criminalized in many parts of the
world.
When the colonial European powers (namely the Spanish) made their way to
the new world, they were concerned more about the mineral riches held in the
mountains than they were about the flora or native peoples. To this end, the people
of the Andes were enslaved and put to work mining for the Spanish mercantile
operations at high altitudes. The most infamous of these operations was the silver
mine at Potosí, in modern day Bolivia, which was at over 4,000 meters above sea
level and during its heyday was the largest human settlement in the western
hemisphere . At first the plant was shunned as the Spanish were puritanical about
the use of mind-altering substances even among the people they viewed as inferior.
Consumption in areas under Spanish control was banned. However, once it was
discovered that their workers could be worked harder and fed less while chewing
coca leaves (Agreda 2000), pursuit of profit in this case trumped the pursuit of godly
behavior. In fact, the Spanish were so fervent in their pursuit of silver that they
actually set up coca plantations near the Potosí mine (and others) and were able to
make them very profitable for a time. Mine managers were able to get maximum
return on very little input which included reducing the workers’ rations to one meal
per day. Today miners at Potosí, though no longer subject to Spanish colonial
control, still chew the plant to deal with the grueling high-altitude conditions
(Chande 2002).
Coca’s relationship to refined cocaine has damaged the plant’s reputation. As
noted above, the plant itself holds little ill effect on individuals and can be beneficial
in helping high altitude societies deals the thin air and a rough environment.
Spanish colonizers recognized this and brought the plant from pockets of the Andes
to regional importance within South America. It was the 1855 discovery of a
refining process for coca by German scientist Friedrich Gaedcke that launched the
coca plant as both a drug and a debate to the world stage. Gaedcke developed a
method that involved several steps of mixing in chemicals, heating to evaporate, and
extracting a product that was one hundred percent alkaloid cocaine. His process is
essentially the same one used today, but with tweaks and variations. The pure
cocaine powder, whose health and social maladies were yet to be fully understood,
became wildly popular in Europe and the United States in the latter half of the 19th
century. Because of the euphoric effect produced, it was adopted early as an
analgesic by many doctors. In Europe, chemist Angelo Mariani made huge profits
selling “cocawine” – wine infused with coca leaf extract similar to what Gaedcke had
created. It was so popular that Pope Leo XIII carried a hipflask of the wine around
with him everywhere and gave Mariani a Vatican Gold Medal for his invention
(Mariani Amalgamated 2009). In the United States, the drink Coca-Cola, still
popular today, included an unknown but definite amount of cocaine in its original
recipe. Cocaine made its way into popular culture as well, as in Arthur Conan
Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes”,
where the eponymous main
character was a frequent
user/abuser of the substance.
In spite of its popularity,
though, the negative effects of
cocaine soon became apparent
both through scientific study and
Figure 2 - Advertisement for a Cocaine-based Product
from the late 19th Century
empirical, common observation. The coca leaf and plant were banned in the United
States in 1914. Cocaine use subsided with the banning of the plant until a general
increase in the use drugs caused the United States to ban cocaine itself in 1970.
Coca and its byproduct are far better understood today, and though both are illegal
in the United States, there is a huge demand and black market for trafficked cocaine.
Demand in the developed world has thrust farmers in the Andes region unwittingly
into the globalized world as they have become the center of drug controversy and
the political conflicts that surround it.
Of the few places left in the world where it is legal to grow cocaine, most are
in the Andes mountains. For example, it is possible to legally purchase chewing
gum, toothpaste, and soft drinks infused with coca leaves on the streets of La Paz
(Agreda 2000). Coca is still chewed by a large portion of mountain dwelling
population in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru as a staple of indigenous lifestyles.
However, it is because of demand in the developed world for cocaine that the leaf
gets refined - and often the line between legal, harmless uses and illegal, destructive
uses becomes blurred. Across the world, cocaine is used to fuel conflict.
Afghanistan, known for its opium-growing capacity, also produces some coca, and
the ruling regime of Myanmar has had a lackluster response to the growing
production of cocaine it its country. However, nowhere is this problem more
pronounced than in the Andean region where the plant’s traditional status makes it
legal to grow and where many farmers depend on the plant which they have
cultivated since before recorded history.
Years of social and political unrest in countries like Bolivia, Peru and
Colombia have led to splintering and revolutionary movements throughout the
Andean region. Guerilla groups like the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia
(FARC) and the Shining Path of Peru wage war in the countryside, and have looked
to coca farmers to subsidize their conflicts (Romero 2009). In their formative years,
the main source of income for the rebels was kidnapping and bomb threats with
ransom demands. Additionally, they trafficked somewhat in the also illicit
marijuana leaf, though with a far lower return. However, the more that Latin
America became subject to globalization and the more that the Andes became
connected to the developed world through trade, the more these rebel groups
realized they could make a profit by selling cocaine to northern markets by
trafficking it through established trade routes.
Gaedcke’s process from 150 years ago has been refined over the years to
make for a potent distillation of pure cocaine. Typically, batches of leaves are
collected and dried, then processed by a machine that turns them into coca paste.
This reduces their weight by a factor of 350 and strongly concentrates the cocaine
alkaloid (Allen 2005, Ungerman 2005). This is usually done as a bulk-reducing
operation, primarily to minimize the weight and size of what has to be trafficked
across boundaries to just the paste. It is done at a at a very small scale, usually the
village level, to protect intricate flow networks so that if one operation is discovered
and shut down there is little to no interruption of the overall supply. From the
village, it is then sent through any number of channels northward until it reaches
the United States or Europe. The paste is then put through a series of chemical
baths and heating and drying processes to purify it completely. Sometimes it is
finalized locally as well, but the more expensive chemical refining is usually done
closer to the destination in the developed world, where the necessary chemicals are
more readily available (Ungerman 2005). At this stage it is turned it into the
powder version, or “crack” (rock-shaped) cocaine which is a less refined version
associated with lower income and inner city consumption.
Significant trafficking has been going on to some degree since demand shot
upwards in the 1960s, and rebel groups, traffickers, and even paramilitaries with a
mixture of alliances all play unique roles in the movement of cocaine. The operation
is truly an international ordeal – local materials are refined using imported
chemicals to get the paste, which is then moved by regional rebel groups across
state lines to anywhere in the world for final processing and consumption.
However, it is the farmers who produce all the coca that are hapless participants in
the wake of these clashes. There is an irony in that coca is produced and funds
conflict in some of the most isolated parts of the world, what could be described as
the “periphery of the periphery” (Allen, 2005), but has found worldwide market for
distribution. Indeed, it is not as clear cut a of dilemma as stopping the farmers from
growing or the rebels from trafficking. The farmers are going to aim for whatever
can provide for their livelihood. Sometimes rebels simply provide protection for
traffickers in exchange for revenues, while in other cases trafficking cartels have
become so wealthy they have formed their own private armies for protection, such
as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) (Steinitz 2002). Other
localities have their own paramilitaries that are associated with the national
government but act in their own interests, clashing against whatever group crosses
their path. The problems today run so deep that it is not simply a matter of
defeating rebels or stopping the illicit production of cocaine, both of these must be
taken into consideration and dealt with simultaneously if there is any hope of
solving both problems. Indeed, both FARC and AUC both deny participating in coca
trade, except to tax it (ibid.). However, they still allow and facilitate its production.
It is possible in areas of Colombia to travel down a country road and be stopped and
questioned at checkpoints by government troops, a paramilitary brigade, and the
FARC all within a few kilometers.
The violence associated with the rebel groups has been internationalized by
the drug trade. Instead of their former strategies of kidnap and extortion or
bombing, rebel groups now rely on drug trafficking and addiction in the developed
world to fuel their struggle. Colombia is an excellent case study for the emergence
of cocaine trade in this respect. It is a country torn by divisions between Native and
European citizens; wealthy and poor; urban and rural. The above mentioned FARC
began in the 1960s as a Marxist-Leninist revolution. At first, FARC relied on
kidnapping and extortion to fund its cause, as well as the trafficking of marijuana,
but then began trafficking cocaine in the late 1970s. They quickly realized that
being linked directly to cocaine hurt their cause domestically and internationally, so
took to facilitating and taxing it instead. The government of Colombia has
responded to this in several ways, the most significant of which are discussed below.
Another development worth noting in Colombia is the development of paramilitary
groups. The country founded these local militias to protect villagers from the being
extorted by the FARC, but in the practice of self-defense many became involved in
the money-making venture of drug trafficking themselves. Now drug trade and
conflict faces a three way parlay between government, paramilitaries that are only
loosely associated with the government or completely separate, and rebel guerilla
groups working to overthrow the government while relying on the drug trade for
funding.
Besides Colombia, Peru and Bolivia have been combating the rise of the drug
trade in their own countries, though each have tried unique approaches to solving
the problem. Eradication has been tried with limited success, as it only works for
one year and cannot possibly reach all of the coca fields in the remote slopes of the
Andes. Interdiction - the searching for and seizure of drugs as they are trafficked has worked, but only for a small percentage of the drugs that are moved. Trade
between Latin America and the developed world, most importantly the United
States in terms of monies exchanged, is of such a massive volume that it would be
impossible to search every north-bound shipment. Plans for “alternative
development”, which have the highest expectations for reducing drug trafficking,
have been hypothesized and implemented in one form or another since the 1980s.
The most notable early plan for alternative development was Richard Nixon’s “War
on Drugs”. An addition to that metaphorical war was launched by the United States
under the Reagan administration in 1987 and changed the focus from discouraging
domestic consumption to prevention via aggressive foreign policy. The purpose of
the program was, in addition to the eradication and interdiction efforts that had
been going on for years, to start paying individual farmers not to grow coca and
instead plant another cash crop such as coffee, bananas, or flowers. This met with
limited success, as many farmers who were to receive this aid complained that the
paltry US $2,500 was not enough to survive on, even with the revenue from
alternative crops (Hellin 2001). At the same time, a concerted television advertising
campaign was launched in the United States to try to reduce demand for the drugs,
which was largely ineffectual. Demand remained steady and production actually
increased throughout the Andes.
Perhaps the War on Drugs could have been more successful in another time,
but the late 1980s saw the collapse of world coffee prices and a resulting
impoverishment of thousands of small-time farms (minifundia) throughout the
Andes (Hellin 2001). With their main source of income gone because of the
devaluation of coffee, many minifundia farmers felt they had no choice but to make a
living in growing coca like their neighbors. Coca has provided a stable source of
revenues on many minifundia as, even if faced with the eradication of their crop,
they can plant the following year with far less investment than a new coffee or
banana planting would cost. Also, cocaine consumption had traditionally held
steady in the developed world, and with fewer sources of coca than coffee, there
were and are far less severe fluctuations in that market. Proposed alternative
development plans ask farmers to go back to cash crops in the same international
market that collapsed on them once, and could easily do so again. The farmers
therefore prefer the crop that will provide them with stability, rather than with
legality. Farmers are seldom faulted for growing coca, especially in regions where it
holds a traditional legal status. However, it should be noted that many of the
farmers growing coca for illicit use would like to go back to growing legal crops and
stop being a destructive force. In these tough times, “[p]easant farmers indeed
prefer working with the legal framework, but not at the price of starvation.” (Lupu
2004)
With the United State more actively involved with combating drug trafficking
in Latin America at the beginning of the 1990s, some countries began to formulate
their own plans and to ask for financial assistance from the newly elected Clinton
administration to implement them. Plan Dignidad in Bolivia is one that met with
some local and short term success. The Bolivian government took the compensation
model from Reagan’s plan and applied it to the village level instead of the individual
- relying on communal, panoptical pressures to keep individual farmers from
breaking away and growing coca once again. The alternative development funding
focused on the Yungas region, where coca growing was legal due to its traditional,
historic status being grown there . The Plan has seen relative success, as since its
inception the acreage of cultivated coca has been significantly reduced. However, it
can be seen as a success only for Bolivia. Observers of trafficking patterns have
noted a “balloon” effect that occurred in surrounding regions during Plan Dignidad.
While coca production was down in the Yungas region, it sprung up in neighboring
regions of Peru . When one squeezes a balloon, the part of it being squeezed
compresses and everything else inflates. In a similar way when one region of coca
production is mitigated another is recruited by cartels, paramilitaries and guerillas
to make up the difference in volume to meet demand (Lupu 2004). Eliminating
supply, then, is far more complicated than simply stamping out particular regions of
production (Friesendorf 2005). Rather, the problem resulting from local-global
factors must be dealt with using regional and inter-state approach.
Another arrangement that was built on this premise is Plan Colombia, though
it was met with little success. Like Plan Dignidad, it used funds from the United
States to combat cocaine trafficking. Instead of alternative crops, the plan focused
more strongly on interdiction and eradication. The plan, which was ideal on paper,
was filled with flaws from its very inception. Money intended for fighting trafficking
was often funneled to corrupt local officials because of the existing rifts and political
instability associated with the paramilitaries. Eradication efforts that did take place
were often haphazard, taking place with minimal expenditure and destroying many
collateral crops in the process (Marquis 2001). Some farmers lost everything even
when they were growing coca legally for their own consumption. Plan Colombia,
though trumpeted by the leadership of the country as an effort to get rid of drugs,
cannot be considered a success by any measure as it did not significantly reduce the
acreage of coca under cultivation. It may indeed have worsened the situation in the
country with the collateral crop damage
creating a greater animosity on the part
of farmers towards the urban elites.
Interdiction, eradication, and
alternative development have all met
with some limited successes on their
Figure 3 - An airplane sprays herbicides over
suspected coca fields in Colombia
own but have failed to stem cocaine
trafficking as a whole. More cocaine is moved north to the United States today than
ever has been before, and the problem begs for a more thorough analysis. Though
fruitful, it has been noted that there are limits to what the first two methods can do
and we must therefore focus on new directions for alternative development. This
method is subject to its own set of problems as well. One problem with alternative
development is that it does not provide the revenue that coca does, and that even
though the United States has offered compensation for money lost in the form of aid,
it is usually not nearly sufficient for the farmers to survive by. The United States has
invested large sums of money in this prospect, but it seems little to actually make a
difference (Forero 2005). Also, asking farmers to switch to other cash crops, no
matter how lucrative they may be or how ever high the monetary encouragement
might be, does not matter if the soil won’t support anything else. Minifundia are
often placed on poor soils high in the Andes or heavily leached soil on the very rainy
eastern slopes. Farmers in these areas may have been growing coca because that is
all the would grow, and may have been doing it for centuries because of that
circumstance. Also a result of the mountainous terrain is the difficulty in
transporting farmed goods to the world markets. Sanho Tree of the Institute for
Policy Studies, put the situation this way in a recent documentary about Plan
Colombia:
“It makes a lot of sense for campesinos [minifundia
farmers] to grow coca, because they can convert coca
into coca paste on their farm in a small, crude lab, and
the traffickers, the middlemen, will come to the farm
near a small town and they will buy the coca paste, and
pay them cash and take it away for them. Now the heart
of U.S. policy requires that these campesinos grow
hundreds of acres of so called “legal crops” instead. But
the problem is that we’re asking these people to grow
hundreds of kilos of Yucca, Plantains, and pineapples
and other things that they have to haul, transport on
vehicles that they don’t have, on roads that don’t exist,
to people in markets both internal and export that they
don’t have access to, and to compete against an
international global economy… against which they don’t
stand a chance. So this is not a formula for success in
terms of alternative development.” (Ungerman 2005)
It would seem, therefore, that returning farmers to a system in which they
are subject to fluctuations of the world market would doom them to a return of the
current situation. There must then be a stable type of alternative development that
eliminates the farmers’ need to grow coca for drug trafficking. Traditional coca
production should continue, as it has been in somewhat stable local demand for
centuries. Evo Morales, the newly elected president of Bolivia, was a coca farmer
himself and spokesman for the farmers’ unions, making it unlikely that use of the
plant will be hindered in that country at all. Perhaps other farmers could take a cue
from the coca farmers and start producing goods bound for local markets rather
than international ones. The United States wants to see a return on its investment
in the Andes in the form of cheap bananas and coffee, but if that mindset is
eliminated a new paradigm could emerge in favor of local trade and development
rather than global. If the motive for increasing globalized progress and national
profit are displaced by a focus on community improvement, then those
communities have a chance to grow the food that they need and export the surplus,
rather than relying on coca as a way to meet their income needs.
Since none of the three measures have appreciably stemmed the cultivation
or flow of coca, then the Andean region of South America would appear to be mired
in the intractable social and economic quandary of small farmers relying on drugs
for their well being. But coca production is about more than supply – there is also
the very strong demand coming from the developed world for stimulant drugs like
cocaine. The developed world has been trying for years to reduce the demand
though advertising and education campaigns, but with little success. The problem is
so difficult that whoever could devise a method for reducing drug use in the
developed world would likely be hailed with the highest. That should not keep
developed countries from continuing to attack the problem on all fronts. If they are
truly serious about reducing the movement of drugs like coca, there should be
programs on he scale of Plan Dignidad and Plan Colombia in the United States, Great
Britain, France and other countries.
Moving forward, those in charge of drug policy from all perspectives need to
refocus on the three main reduction methods used in the past but learn from the
their shortcomings to make new programs stronger. Also, the developed world
needs to refocus and take more responsibility for the demand in their countries.
When the developing and developed world see their problems as intertwined and
being to work in tandem they can take the first steps toward resolution.
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