TOCAÑA, Bolivia —A North American traveling to some parts of South America—Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, for example—is intrigued by these lands as the locus for a major source of drugs in the United States, cocaine in particular. How many lives have been scarred, if not lost, to addiction, crime, loss of jobs, income and loving family ties? For generations, American authorities have committed themselves to the eradication of killer drugs with publicly staged raids, arrests, convictions, jail terms. Yet the flow of drugs continues to serve the apparent market and need. Anyone desiring such drugs will have no trouble finding them on our streets.
American citizens will never know how much of the government’s efforts are performative, and how much a cover-up of established routes and networks involving highly placed officials, bribes, payoffs and favors. The U.S. State Department has certainly been known to look the other way if a compliant pro-American, anti-labor dictator, or even elected president, is complicit with the drug trade (see the recent history of Honduras as a good case in point). The occasional widely publicized drug bust may be a smokescreen obscuring all the other traffic that calmly proceeds under the radar.
Yet at the point of origin, coca is totally benign, a cash crop like any other, its by-products readily available for sale and consumption. On a recent trip to Bolivia, I had the opportunity to sample some coca within minutes of having my passport stamped by immigration control: The indefatigable William Camacaro of the Alliance for Global Justice, the organizer of my trip, had come to the airport at La Paz to greet me. I found him just past the gate seated at Alexander’s café sipping from a cup of coca tea. He invited me to join him and relax for a few minutes before we hailed a taxi into town. The waiter took my order for some tea of my own—my choices included black tea or mint—and promptly arrived with a pot of hot water and a commercially packed coca teabag.
“It might help you to get used to the elevation here,” William told me. At 11,975 feet above sea level, La Paz is the highest city in the world with a population of over a million. It often takes travelers two or three days to acclimate themselves to this new reality, which can involve headaches, dizziness, loss of appetite. I had come prepared with a 14-day supply of Acetazolamide tablets.
Once on the streets of La Paz, over the two-day adjustment period I’d allotted for myself before the formal delegation began, I could feel the effects of the elevation. It’s a hilly city and you can barely walk more than a block or two without encountering steep steps or a rise in the pavement. I found myself huffing and puffing after walking just one uphill block. Was it the oxygen, or was it my age and physical condition? Of course I choose to believe the former.
On the streets you can find almost anything you’re looking for, and a whole lot more that you weren’t. Stalls occupy every vacant corner. Some streets are closed off so that tradespeople can set up their booths right down the middle. It seems like the whole city is one big open-air marketplace.
Among these tiny shops are people who sell botánicas, traditional medicinal plants and derivatives to cure what ails you. Back pain, stomach upset, liver, kidney, heart, joints, something here will treat it. And they sell bags of coca leaves, about 4 x 6 inches in dimension. Look around and you see many folks with a wad of these leaves tucked into one cheek, sucking out the juice. It’s part refreshment, part habit, part stimulant, part pastime. For thousands of years people living in the Andes have chewed or otherwise consumed fresh-picked coca leaves as an efficient means of coping with the altitude and so many others of life’s difficulties. For 5 bolivianos—about 50 or 60 cents depending on the exchange rate—you can purchase your peace of mind.
Is it real? Or just a placebo? I don’t know, but somehow I believe tens of millions of people all throughout the Andes can’t be wrong.
I purchased a bag and sampled it. After chewing for a while, I spit the pulpy residue out. I’d been told not to swallow it—it could cause intestinal problems. It tasted like—it’s hard to say—the way leaves of any plant would taste, kind of bland with a faint peppery flavor. I took two or three more “hits” of my new drug, and lost interest. The rest of the bag made it home with me. I think it might be best to pulverize the dry leaves and make a tea out of it. Anyway, bottom line, it’s probably an acquired taste. I didn’t get addicted.
There’s also a variety of bottled coca drinks. I tried a couple and they’re deliciously thirst-quenching, but honestly not much different from almost any refreshing bottled soda. I guess I’d have to stay in Bolivia a lot longer to do actual research into the subject.
Understandably, for a group of eco-tourists from the U.S. and Canada, coca in its various avatars came up in conversation many times. But it wasn’t until the last day of our trip that we got the real low-down on this humble little bush that, if it were planted in a public garden in the U.S., would look totally unremarkable.
To our surprise, our educator was Edgar Gemio, the emcee/singer/host whom we had met the previous day in the Afro-Bolivian community of Tocaña. We trotted up a short hillside to listen to his presentation.
Coca is perfectly legal to grow in designated spaces. A family plot is small and manageable, maybe an eighth of an acre at most. You can only pick so many leaves at a time because you don’t want to damage the plant, and also they have to be fresh enough to bring to market. The plant grows year-round, so it requires constant attention. Before 1952, when a life-changing agrarian reform law passed, peasants lived on great latifundias, working three days for themselves and three days for the patrón. Even then, though, there were many abuses, with latifundistas appropriating more than their agreed share. After 1952, when the huge estates were broken up—many of them nowhere nearly as productive as they could have been under private small family ownership—families could grow coca for the local economy.
Before picking his first leaf to show us, Edgar removed a small flask from his pocket and spilled out a splash by way of asking permission from Mother Earth. He also turned on his portable radio—a necessary accoutrement to a laborer’s hours in the sun. He demonstrated how a worker must hunch over the plants, which only grow to about three feet high, and how you tie a cloth around your waist to form a collection basket. Coca plants are staggered down rows, and if it’s on a slope, which is more common than not in this part of the world, the farmer must build low little terraces in the soil to protect against erosion. Almost everywhere you look in Bolivia you can see this terracing as part of the human-made environment. Some of them are ancient, going back to the Inca period and no longer in use, some might appear to be unused but are simply being left fallow for a season to regenerate, and others are visibly in active use.
The leaves are left on a sheet in the open air to dry for four hours in full sun, though in a mountainous terrain like this, a whole day of full sun is rare. But you have to watch for ants, which before you know it can eat off particles of leaves and cart them away to their nest until you have no crop left. You also have to strategically place your leaves to limit the chance of a sudden wind picking them up and sending them whirling away. Watch the clouds, too, because a rain storm could also spoil your crop. And those pretty butterflies that light on your coca leaves? Chase them away if you can because they leave a hole in the leaf that makes it worthless.
When it comes to marketing, farmers don’t have a lot of options. They need a permit to sell their product. There are authorized, known buyers who purchase small lots. If a stranger turns up, a farmer can only sell them a maximum of one kilo (2.2 pounds). The buyers distribute the coca leaves to a central market in town and then they get sold in turn to thousands of small vendors. How some of it might find its way into the international market for conversion into what we know as cocaine, that’s many steps away from the farmer in Tocaña. It’s no different from any producer or manufacturer who has no final control over what happens to their sneakers or avocados once they leave their hands.
Many in the West are unclear about the difference between coca and cocaine. Edgar tells of groups from Europe who will daringly stretch out one index finger to timidly touch a coca leaf, as though they’d get cocaine poisoning coming that close to the source product. But the process of extracting the coca leaf’s narcotic potential is far, far removed from what the farmer hands over to the local distributor. Farmers in these growing regions only want coca to be decriminalized and to get a fair price for it, as with yucca, coffee or any other product. If the U.S. wants to fight the drug lords and organized crime on their own streets, fine. These smallholder families only ask to be left in peace back home where millions of Indigenous and other people of the Americas are using coca and its derivative products to heal themselves and survive the low oxygen at these precipitous heights.
Much more could be said on this, but that’s what I’ve got.
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