Coca leaf growers from the traditional region of Yungas, in northwest Bolivia, surround the legislature in the city of La Paz, demanding an expansion of the legal cultivation area by the new law. Credit: Franz Chávez.

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Mar 9 2017 (IPS)

A new bill in Bolivia, which will allow the amount of land allocated to producing coca to be increased from 12,000 to 22,000 hectares, modifying a nearly three-decade coca production policy, has led to warnings from independent voices and the opposition that the measure could fuel drug trafficking.

Since 1988, the amount of land authorised for growing coca has been 12,000 hectares, according to Law 1,008 of the Regulation of Coca and Controlled Substances, which is line with the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

This United Nations Convention pointed the way to a phasing-out of the traditional practice among indigenous peoples in the Andean region of chewing coca leaves, which was encouraged during the Spanish colonial period, when the native population depended heavily on coca leaves for energy as they were forced to extract minerals from deep mine pits.

But the traditional use of coca leaves instead grew in Bolivia. According to the president of the lower house of Congress, Gabriela Montaño, some 3.3 million of the country’s 11 million people currently use coca in traditional fashion.

Citing these figures, lawmakers passed the new General Law on Coca on Feb. 24. The bill is now awaiting President Evo Morales’ signature.“This law is making available to the drug trafficking trade more than 11,000 metric tons of coca leaves per year, the average yield from the 8,000 hectares which the law grants to producers.” – Public letter signed by local intellectuals.

Morales originally rose to prominence as the leader of the seven unions of coca leaf growers in the central region of Chapare, in the department of Cochabamba, fighting against several conservative governments that wanted to eradicate coca cultivation, in accordance with Law 1,008 and the U.N. Convention.

The law had enabled the anti-drug forces, financed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to wage an all-out war against coca cultivation. The struggle against the law catapulted Morales as a popular figure and later as a politician and the country’s first indigenous president, in January 2006.

Montaño estimates that annual production amounts to 30,900 metric tons, 24,785 of which are used for medicinal purposes, in infusions or rituals, she said.

The remaining 6,115 tons are processed into products, or used for research and export, she said.

Assessing compliance with the 1961 Convention, medical doctor and researcher Franklin Alcaraz told IPS that in South America, only Ecuador has managed to eradicate the practice of chewing coca leaves.

On Feb. 28, some fifty intellectuals signed a public letter titled: “Public Rejection of the General Law on Coca”, which stated that “this law is making available to the drug trafficking trade more than 11,000 metric tons of coca leaves per year, the average yield from the 8,000 hectares which the law grants to producers.”

Bolivia was one of the 73 signatory countries to the 1961 Convention where clause “e” of article 49 declared that the practice of chewing coca leaves would be banned within 25 years of the (1964) implementation of the accord.

In January 2013, Bolivia recovered the right to practice traditional coca chewing, when it won a special exemption to the 1961 Convention. Its request was only voted against by 15 of the 183 members of the U.N., including Germany, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Wives of coca leaf farmers from Yungas during a vigil at the gates of the La Paz police station, where dozens of leaders were taken, accused of inciting disturbance during the demonstrations held to demand an expansion of the legal cultivation area in their region in northwest Bolivia. Credit: Franz Chávez.

In a January 2014 communique, the representative of the United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonino De Leo, stated that the exemption “only applies to the national territory.”

The new bill repeals the first 31 articles of the 1988 law and legalises 22,000 hectares for cultivation – 10,000 more than before.

In practice, the new legal growing area is just slightly larger than the 20,200 hectares of coca which UNODC counted in 2015, according to its July 2016 report on the country.

President Morales has defended the increase in the legal cultivation area and reiterated his interest in carrying out an old project for the industrialisation of coca leaves.

On Feb. 28, Morales expressed his support for the new bill and accused conservative governments of supporting the demonisation and criminalisation of coca leaf chewing at an international level.

Montaño said that in 2006, when Morales first took office, 17,000 hectares of coca were grown in the Chapare region. Ten years later, UNODC registered only 6,000 hectares devoted to coca production.

She said that under Morales, the reduction of coca crops has been negotiated and without violence, in contrast to the repression by conservative governments that generated “blood and mourning”.

Before Congress passed the law, coca producers from the semitropical region of Yungas, in the department of La Paz, held violent protests in the capital.

Between Feb. 17 and Feb. 23, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded Murillo square in La Paz, where the main buildings of the executive and legislative branches are located, demanding 300 additional hectares, on top of the 14,000 presently dedicated to coca in Yungas.

There are an estimated 33,000 coca farmers in Yungas, and 45,000 in Chapare.

In the midst of clashes with the police, destruction of public property and the arrest of at least 143 organisers, talks were held with the government, which ended up giving in to the demands.

The settlement also granted growers in the Chapare region an additional 1,700 hectares, on top of the 6,000 currently registered and monitored by UNODC.

Political analyst Julio Aliaga told IPS that traditional use of coca leaves only requires 6,000 hectares, rather than the 22,000 hectares that the government of the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) is about to legalise.

This figure of 6,000 hectares is drawn from a European Union study on demand for coca leaves in Bolivia for infusions, chewing or in rituals. This study was not mentioned by the authorities or MAS legislators.

“Bolivia has a large surplus of coca which goes toward drug trafficking. The cocaine ends up in Africa, Europe and Russia, and the new colossal market of China,” Aliaga said.

Samuel Doria Medina, the leader of the opposition centre-left National Unity (UN), questioned the 80 per cent expansion of the lawful cultivation area and told IPS that the measure is “a clear sign of an interest in increasing the production of narcotic drugs.“

“The new policy will be indefensible before multilateral drug control agencies,“ since the UNODC certified that “94 per cent of the coca production from Chapare goes toward the production of cocaine,” he said.

In his opinion, the new law provides an incentive for the drug trafficking mafias to sell drugs in Bolivia, “with the well-known violence that this business entails.”

Part of the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ) in October, seen from the banks of the Caceribu river, the closest to the installations that the public can get. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ITABORAÍ, Brazil , Oct 29 2015 (IPS)

Working as a musician in a military band is the dream of 21-year-old Jackson Coutinho, since hopes that a petrochemical complex would drive the industrialisation of this Brazilian city near Rio de Janeiro have gone up in smoke.

“I’ll try out for the navy, army and even the military police, but only to be a musician, not a police officer,” said Coutinho, who plays the double bass in bands he has set up with friends in Itaboraí.

Until last year he was working for the QGIT consortium on the construction of the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ). He was a machine operator assistant on the embankment where the Natural Gas Processing Unit (UPGN), part of the complex, was built.

But he lost his job in early 2015, when lay-offs intensified as a result of the crisis faced by Petrobras, the state oil company that owns COMPERJ.

The initial projected cost of the megaproject was 6.5 billion dollars. But with cost overruns it has risen to twice that amount, even though the project was reduced drastically to a single refinery and the UPGN.

The most expensive part, the petrochemical plant, which would have fuelled industrialisation in this city 45 km from Rio de Janeiro, was cancelled because Petobras did not manage to find partners.

The plunge in oil prices and the corruption scandal shaking the company since March 2014, implicating dozens of politicians and businesspersons for billions of dollars in kickbacks, smothered the plan to build in Itaboraí the biggest petrochemical complex in Latin America.

The losses are huge. “Of 14 plants or buildings where I worked on the construction, only four or five will be used,” said Rogerio Henrique Lourenço, 26, a building technician who was employed by the COMPERJ works for five years.

Besides the white elephants – the shiny modern buildings still empty within the 45 square kilometres of the shrunken megaproject – equipment was purchased and infrastructure was built, which require costly maintenance while the future remains uncertain.

To that is added the expense of the compensation and mitigation of the social and environmental impacts, which has included sanitation, clean-up of rivers, and reforestation – obligations that have not shrunk in accordance with the downsizing of the project.

The municipalities under the influence of COMPERJ, especially Itaboraí, are losing the prospect of development promised in 2006, when then president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) announced the project.

At the time he said it would consist of two refineries and two petrochemical units, besides installations for services and training of the necessary technical personnel.

The Getulio Vargas Foundation, a leading economic think tank, predicted that the petrochemical complex would foment the emergence of a plastics industry hub. According to its projections, between 362 companies – a conservative estimate – and 724 companies – a more optimistic forecast – would set up shop in the area.

That fast-forward industrialisation was expected to generate between 117,000 and 168,000 jobs in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro – just over one-third of which were to be concentrated in COMPERJ’s direct area of influence.

Itaboraí, as the city where COMPERJ is located, was to reap the greatest benefits, leaving behind its status as one of the poorest municipalities in the state – a commuter town whose residents work in neighbouring cities.

Jackson Coutinho, 21, managed to buy a car after working 18 months in a construction company helping to build the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ) in Brazil. Now unemployed, the dream of this worker from the city of Itaboraí is to join a military band as a musician, and study accounting. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“The castle came crumbling down,” said Lourenço, who was laid off in March 2014, when construction of the petrochemical complex began to run out of steam.

The father of three young children now gets by with casual work, mainly on small-scale construction sites. When he talked to IPS he was handing out pamphlets on the main street of Itaboraí.

His dream is to pass a civil service exam and become a public employee, with job stability.
“In COMPERJ I had well-paid jobs, but they were temporary,” he said. His five years there were divided between short-term contracts in a number of different companies.

Francisco Assunção, 22, had a similar experience. He worked for nearly two years in three of the dozens of companies participating in the construction of COMPERJ.

Now he is trying to make a living with his motorcycle taxi, “but people prefer to walk, because they don’t have money,” he said. So he also finds casual or part-time work in the construction industry and restaurants.

“I earned more in the COMPERJ jobs,” he said. Although he was paid just 300 dollars a month, he got an additional 40 percent for food and medical assistance, he explained.

Coutinho stands out because he spent 18 months in the same job, which made it possible for him to be promoted and to earn enough to buy a car. “It was a dream, but it’s over,” he said.

Although he is focused on his musical career, he has a “Plan B”: to study accounting, although he doesn’t like math. “I have friends who are accountants,” he said.

But he is confident that “COMPERJ will resume its original plan (to build a petrochemical complex), because too much money was invested there, and they went beyond the point of no return.” An estimated 80 percent of the construction is complete.

Rogerio Henrique Lourenço, 26, worked for five years on the construction of the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ) in Brazil, for several different companies. Now he supports his three young children and their mother in the city of Itaborai, where the shrunken and stalled megaproject is located, with casual work. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

For these young men, the well-paying, steady work they enjoyed for several years merely drove home the lack of opportunities in Itaboraí, a 343-year-old city of 230,000 people that has remained faithful to its origins as a town that emerged alongside a highway, which is now its long central avenue.

The scant local productive activity, virtually limited to ceramics and orange groves, offers neither jobs nor intellectual stimulus for young people.

“This is a city that does not cultivate a cultural identity,” Franciellen Fonseca, who is studying to become a social worker and is taking part in the Incid research project, told IPS. “There are no recreational opportunities, plazas or places where locals can gather.”

The study by the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE) monitors compliance with citizen rights in the 14 municipalities in COMPERJ’s area of influence, based on a system of indicators that the non-governmental organisation developed.

Its most recent study, on “the invisible citizenship rights of COMPERJ workers”, stressed the difficulty of obtaining information about the situation faced by labourers working on the project.

Refusing to provide information on the workers’ conditions is “a serious rights violation, because it makes it impossible to closely monitor the effects and impacts of these megaprojects on people’s lives,” says an Incid research project report.

The number of workers on the COMPERJ construction sites has never been revealed. There was talk of 30,000 at the height of construction, in 2012-2013, and figures have varied widely since then.

The young men who were laid off and talked to IPS say local workers were a minority on the construction sites – running counter to the promise to put a priority on hiring local labour. One of the numerous strikes that brought work temporarily to a halt demanded precisely that more local workers be hired, Coutinho pointed out.

The companies argued that there was not enough skilled local labour. But when people with the necessary training appeared, the companies set impossibly high standards for prior work experience, or simply did not hire them, said Lourenço.

The “invisibility” surrounding workers at COMPERJ was broken by the frequent strikes and rioting, which the old union was unable to handle.

Its successor, the Itaboraí union of assembly and maintenance workers, emerged in June 2014 to confront a different reality: the growing wave of lay-offs.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

In Bolivia, licensed growers can legally cultivate a limited quantity of coca—a policy that has actually reduced overall production. But because it doesn’t fit the U.S. drug war model, the policy has raised hackles in Washington. Credit: Thomas Grisaffi/FPIF

By Zoe Pearson and Thomas Grisaffi
WASHINGTON, Sep 26 2014 (IPS)

Once again, Washington claims Bolivia has not met its obligations under international narcotics agreements. For the seventh year in a row, the U.S. president has notified Congress that the Andean country “failed demonstrably” in its counter-narcotics efforts over the last 12 months. Blacklisting Bolivia means the withholding of U.S. aid from one of South America’s poorest countries.

The story has hardly made the news in the United States, and that is worrisome. While many countries in the hemisphere call for drug policy reform and are willing to entertain new strategies in that vein, it remains business-as-usual in the United States.

In the present geopolitical context, when even U.S. drug war allies Colombia and Mexico are calling for new approaches to controlling narcotics, the U.S. rejection of the Bolivian model further undermines Washington’s waning legitimacy in the hemisphere.
The U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), meanwhile, seems to think that Bolivia is doing a great job, lauding the government’s efforts to tackle coca production (coca is used to make cocaine) and cocaine processing for the past three years.

The Organisation of American States (OAS) is also heaping praise on Bolivia, calling Bolivia’s innovative new approach to coca control an example of a “best practice” in drug policy.

According to the UNODC, Bolivia has decreased the amount of land dedicated to coca plants by about 26 percent from 2010-2013. Approximately 56,800 acres are currently under production

U.S. opposition

Bolivia has achieved demonstrable successes without—and perhaps because of—a complete lack of support from the United States: the Drug Enforcement Administration left in 2009 and all U.S. aid for drug control efforts ended in 2013.

Bearing in mind that U.S. drug policy in the Andes has always emphasised “supply-side” reduction like coca crop eradication, the decision is of course a political one. It reflects U.S. frustration that Bolivia isn’t bending to Washington’s will. Interestingly, most Bolivian-made cocaine ends up in Europe and Brazil—not the United States.

At the same time, Peru and Colombia, both U.S. favorites given their willingness to fall in line with U.S. drug policy mandates, were not included in the list of failures. To be sure, those countries have recently decreased coca crop acreage as well; in some years by a lot more than Bolivia has. Still, they had respectively about 66,200 and 61,700 acres more coca under cultivation than Bolivia in 2013, according to the UNODC’s June 2014 findings. Peru currently produces the most cocaine of any country in the world.

Bolivians have been consuming the coca plant for over 4,000 years as a tea, food, and medicine, and for religious and cultural practices. Coca, the cheapest input in the cocaine commodity chain, cannot be considered equivalent to cocaine, since over 20 chemicals are needed to convert the harmless leaf into the powdery party drug and its less glamorous cousin, crack.

Still, coca is listed as a Schedule 1 narcotic under the 1961 U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (the defining piece of international drug control legislation).

When Evo Morales became president of Bolivia he worked to modify the Convention, and in 2013 eventually wrested from the U.N. the right to allow limited coca production and traditional consumption within Bolivia’s borders. In the process, all Latin American countries except Mexico (which supported the U.S.-led objection) supported Morales’ mission.

The Bolivian model

The basics of Bolivia’s approach to reining in coca cultivation are fairly simple. Licensed coca growers can legally cultivate a limited amount of coca (1,600 square metres) to ensure some basic income, and they police their neighbours to ensure that fellow growers stay within the legal limits. Government forces step in to eradicate coca only when a grower or coca grower’s union refuses to cooperate.

This grassroots control is possible because of the strength of agricultural unions in Bolivia’s coca growing regions and because of growers’ solidarity with President Morales, himself a coca grower.

Another incentive is that reducing supply drives up coca leaf prices, which means that producers can earn more money for their families. As one longtime grower and coca union leader from the Chapare growing region put it: “It’s less work and I make more money.” This income stability, combined with targeted aid from the Bolivian government, means that many coca growers are able to make a living wage and diversify their livelihood strategies—investing in shops, other legal crops, and education.

It also helps that the violence and intimidation at the hands of the previously U.S.-backed Bolivian military has come to an end. People remember what is was like, and many still suffer injuries sustained during different eradication campaigns. One coca grower, for example, had her jaw broken so badly by a soldier as she marched for the right to grow coca that she cannot be fitted for dentures to replace her missing teeth. She emphasized that life is so much better now because it’s less stressful. People do not want to see a return to forced eradication campaigns.

No one is pretending that Bolivia’s coca control approach means the end of cocaine production.  Some portion of coca leaf production—by some estimates, about 22,200-plus acres worth—is still ending up in clandestine, rudimentary labs where it is processed into cocaine paste.

Furthermore, because it is squeezed between Peru, a major cocaine exporter, and Brazil, a growing importer, Bolivia has found it increasingly difficult to control cocaine flows. As a result, despite increased narcotics seizures by Bolivian security forces under Morales’ government, drug trade activities within Bolivia’s borders by some accounts have actually increased over the last few years.

Nevertheless, and for better or worse, the country’s new method of coca control yields results and undeniably satisfies the U.S. supply-side approach, yet Washington maintains its hardline stance against the county. In the present geopolitical context, when even U.S. drug war allies Colombia and Mexico are calling for new approaches to controlling narcotics, the U.S. rejection of the Bolivian model further undermines Washington’s waning legitimacy in the hemisphere.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service. Read the original version of this story here.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

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