In unguarded moments during the month-long road blockade of September and October 2000, coca growers and Bolivian security forces chatted, played soccer and ate together while they waited for government orders to reinitiate their confrontation. In a country where coca leaves have been legally consumed and used in rituals for centuries—even soldiers chew the leaf during coca eradication missions and clashes with protesters—this strangely amicable standoff demonstrates how, to many Bolivians, U.S. drug control objectives are an external imposition doing more harm than good. A 1998 survey found that even among the military, 73% of personnel believed the armed forces participate in anti-drug efforts as a result of U.S. pressure.[1] “The reality is that the military,” commented an ex-officer, “is conscious that eradication has created economic and social conflict.”[2]
Just four days after President Carlos Mesa’s inauguration in October 2003, U.S. drug czar John Walters warned that “hitching Bolivia’s future to coca cultivation could relegate it to permanent backwater status.”[3] Mesa soon confirmed the continuation of coca eradication as official state policy. Like presidents before him, Mesa recognized that his country’s dependence on international aid forces it to comply with U.S. anti-drug goals despite the social costs. Mesa told The Wall Street Journal, “Coca production has fallen, but Bolivia’s income has fallen as well, and we haven’t received the equivalent compensation.”[4]
Ironically, heavy U.S. government pressure has increased popular support for the growers’ leader, Evo Morales, and has helped make the Bush administration’s concerns about the coca growers’ political influence a reality. Recognizing the adverse impact of their remarks, U.S. officials have recently become less vocal regarding Morales and the growers’ increasing political clout. U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia David Greenlee echoed Washington’s underlying position in May 2004: “I don’t talk about Evo [Morales] in public, people really look for the U.S. to demonize him and then support for him goes up.… The guy is a kind of godfather of coca in the Chapare … and I’m not going to deal with a godfather.”[5]
Since the mid-1980s, U.S. drug control policy has been largely directed at the Chapare region east of Cochabamba where most of Bolivia’s coca leaf destined for transformation into cocaine is grown. The emphasis has always been on violent intervention by special police and military units, rather than the economic assistance programs called “alternative development.”
Considering the country holds the world record for coups d’état, it is understandable that most Bolivians are leery of military involvement in domestic affairs. Still, U.S. policy has consistently forced the country’s presidents to accept some U.S. and domestic military participation in the “drug war,” without regard for the congressional approval required by Bolivian law. Washington has been unwilling to back down despite the conflict generated by its policies and the tremendous cost to Bolivia’s sovereignty and stability.
Former dictator Hugo Bánzer, elected president in 1997, established the armed forces as the centerpiece of his anti-drug strategy. Since then, increased responsibility for internal law enforcement—beginning with counternarcotics missions and expanding into other areas—paired with the militarization of the anti-drug police, UMOPAR, has provoked conflict and heightened the traditional rivalry between these forces and Bolivia’s national police. Competition for anti-drug resources from the United States has exacerbated the situation. These tensions, coupled with limited respect for democracy and human rights among the security forces, partly contributed to a shootout between the military and the police in February 2003 in front of the presidential palace in La Paz, leaving 33 dead. Indeed, Bolivia’s growing unrest and instability are in no small measure due to U.S. drug war policies.
In 1988, the Bolivian government passed Law 1008, a draconian anti-drug law developed by the U.S. government. It provided the justification and framework for the U.S. “war on drugs” in Bolivia and delineated which coca in what areas would be slated for eradication. The implementation of the law has been especially harmful to coca-growing families and those occupying the lower rungs of the cocaine industry, while having little lasting impact on high-level trafficking. Security forces often direct their actions at the easily accessible plots of vulnerable coca-growing families, resulting in human rights abuses and harassment.[6 ]Recent modifications to Law 1008, however, have addressed some of the most egregious abuses, particularly a number related to constitutional violations and due process. Before the reforms, for example, arbitrary arrest and lengthy incarceration without trial meant that people lacking the means to bribe their way out of jail spent several years in prison without the opportunity to prove their innocence or be sentenced.
Bolivia’s other main coca-growing zone is east of La Paz in the Yungas region. The Yungas, however, has only experienced one incursion by military eradication forces—albeit a failed one—and an ineffectual ongoing voluntary eradication program. Eradication efforts have almost exclusively focused on the Chapare, because the government sanctions the 12,000 hectares (1 hectare = 2.5 acres) of coca grown in the Yungas as “legal” and “traditional” whereas the bulk of illegal coca has historically been grown in the Chapare. But with the drop in coca production in the Chapare, Washington has placed greater focus on what it considers the Yungas’ burgeoning excess coca crop.
As eradication forces eliminate their principal source of income, farmers have frequently pinned their hopes on the promise of alternative development. Consequently, there is hardly a farmer in the Chapare who has not participated in one of the four major alternative development projects the U.S. government has financed over the past 20 years at a cost of about $270 million dollars.[7] Despite the significant international funding to the region, the vast majority of Chapare residents continue to live at subsistence levels.
Early development programs in the Chapare sought to directly substitute the coca-cocaine economy with other crops, but eventually administrators realized no other crop could directly compete with coca. In the late 1980s, they changed strategy and tried to curb the migration of impoverished Bolivians to the Chapare. During the past 10 years, they have focused on promoting the cultivation and export of bananas, passion fruit, hearts of palm, black pepper and pineapple. Eradication of coca has always been a condition for participation in these programs, and U.S. policymakers generally perceived this conditionality as the key to success.[8] Whereas good economic development practice considers the participation of strong local organizations an enormous asset, in the Chapare, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has consistently demonized the tight-knit campesino unions—the principal representatives of the growers—calling their members and leaders “drug traffickers.”[9]
Added to these two elements—exclusion of local representatives and conditionality—is the enormous challenge of conducting development programs in a zone of recurring conflict. After 20 years of unfulfilled promises, coca-growing families are deeply distrustful of the United States and are not likely to differentiate between U.S.-funded military and police actions and U.S.-funded development programs. In fact, official U.S. documents rarely make this distinction; almost every government publication on alternative development makes it clear that coca eradication and not economic development is the primary goal in the Chapare.[10] Indeed, alternative development serves as a political tool in the war on drugs, attempting to put a friendlier face on a repressive policy designed to separate campesinos from their livelihoods without providing viable alternatives.
Both of these poorly formulated facets of the U.S. war on drugs—militaristic intervention and alternative development—saw their maximum expression in Plan Dignidad (Plan Dignity), the forced eradication program initiated in 1998 to curry favor with the U.S. Embassy. Bánzer used the military to eradicate a record 45,000 hectares of coca—most of the Chapare’s production—by 2000. Touted by U.S. officials as a huge victory, accelerated forced eradication steeply increased human rights violations and contributed to one of the country’s worst economic crises. Forced eradication also strengthened opposition to other U.S.-backed policies promoting economic liberalization, such as the privatization of basic services and natural resources.
Washington dictates how the war on drugs will be fought in Bolivia and controls the purse strings. In the Chapare, the U.S. government trains, equips and funds all anti-drug units, providing even the salary bonuses for antinarcotics police, military eradication officials and prosecutors. Since the implementation of Plan Dignidad, the U.S. government has paid for and supervised the construction and expansion of military and police installations throughout the region, despite an October 2000 agreement between the Bolivian government and coca growers prohibiting the building of new bases. U.S. government agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS) of the embassy, share a base with local anti-drug forces in Chimore and closely supervise the Bolivian units’ operations. Control is so tight that Bolivian eradication commanders must obtain embassy permission for each flight in helicopters donated and fueled by the U.S. government.
Plan Dignidad has brought to the Chapare the highest per capita military and militarized police presence in the nation. The Expeditionary Task Force (ETF) formed in 2001 is the most notorious U.S.-funded unit in the Chapare. It is implicated in the bulk of human rights violations committed during its two years of existence. Washington cut funding to the ETF in mid-2002 because of negative press coverage and pressure from members of the U.S. Congress. Although the commanders of the ETF were military officers, the rank and file was private contract employees; the head of Bolivia’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s office referred to them as “mercenaries.” Since 1998, security forces have killed 33 coca growers and injured 570. The escalating violence against campesinos led to retaliatory attacks on security forces, resulting in the deaths of 27 security officers between 1998 and 2004, primarily from gunshots or explosive booby traps (cazabobos).
Although the U.S. government funds human rights initiatives and facilitates related training for anti-drug forces, pressure to maintain eradication has trumped respect for human rights. The U.S. government has never invoked the Leahy Amendment, which stipulates that units of security forces credibly implicated in gross human rights violations cannot receive U.S. funds unless the country is taking “effective measures to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice.”[11] This is despite a 2003 State Department report disclosing:
Some members of the security forces committed serious human rights abuses.… Security forces killed dozens and injured hundreds of protestors during episodes of violent social unrest.… There were unconfirmed allegations of torture by the police and security forces.… The government’s delay in completing effective investigations and identifying and punishing those responsible for either civilian or security force deaths resulted in a perception of impunity.[12]
Soldiers accused of committing abuses receive rapid acquittals in military tribunals even though Bolivian law stipulates such cases fall within the jurisdiction of civilian courts. Not coincidentally, this legal strategy originated in the Chapare. The Bolivian Constitutional Tribunal—the country’s highest court—ruled in May 2004 that four military officers accused of killing a nurse and another civilian must be tried within the civilian court system. The day of the ruling, dressed in their battle fatigues the commanders of all branches of the armed forces met with the President and later with the media to declare their refusal to abide by the court’s ruling. Such behavior demonstrates the extent to which the military continues to challenge civilian authority.
The State Department report recognizes that Bolivian military tribunals promote impunity, stating they are generally “susceptible to senior-level influence” and avoid “rulings that would embarrass the military.”[13] Largely due to the efforts of human rights organizations, the U.S. Congress made respect for human rights and cooperation in investigations a prerequisite for disbursement of 2004 funding. Yet U.S. authorities have been unwilling to support prosecution of military officers in civilian courts even though they helped write and implement the legal code requiring this condition. To avoid having to comply with U.S. congressional requirements, the State Department misrepresented facts in an April 2004 report by stating that the Bolivian military had cooperated in civilian investigations of human rights violations when they had categorically refused to do so.[14]
Respect for human rights legislation is not the only U.S. policy goal to take a backseat to the militarized eradication program. USAID’s economic development programs failed to keep pace with forced eradication during Plan Dignidad, placing 45,000 to 50,000 families in the Chapare in severe economic crisis. The Chapare’s Human Rights Ombudsman reported increased malnutrition and prostitution in the region.[15] The poverty created by eradication contributes to the recurring violence against authorities, which is used in turn to justify further excessive use of force.
Ironically, ongoing eradication has actually helped boost coca production. In 2002, Ambassador Greenlee estimated that coca production in the Chapare had increased by 30% during the previous year.[16] A reason for the increase in production is that accelerated eradication has pushed coca prices up, providing even greater incentive for increasingly impoverished farmers to grow coca. In most areas there is no viable alternative to coca, and alternative crops promoted by USAID have failed to produce any significant income.
USAID runs its current alternative development program through private subcontractors, the largest of which is Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a Washington-based development contractor with $165 million dollars in annual revenues. In the Chapare, DAI emphasizes agribusiness marketing, private sector investment, agricultural technology transfer, road maintenance and the strengthening of alternative development organizations. Considering Bolivian history, the program’s reliance on the private sector for improving the economic circumstances of impoverished campesinos makes little sense. The private sector in Bolivia has always tended to focus on quick profits, given the chronically unstable political and economic environment. The U.S. General Accounting Office calls the Bolivian private sector “weak and cautious” and notes that it “did not fulfill the role envisioned by U.S.AID.”[17] Although coca growers clearly require assistance to develop export markets, programs that favor the private sector are a poor fit in a context where wealthy business owners have abused indigenous people for centuries and where strong communal traditions emphasize cooperation over competition.
Beginning in the 1960s, campesino unions became the principal representatives of these communal traditions and community-based organizing. Before the drug war, when the national government’s presence was virtually non-existent in the Chapare, they also assumed the role of local government. The unions assigned land, resolved disputes and undertook community projects such as building schools or roads. Over the past 20 years they have grown stronger as they have organized to resist U.S. drug policy, coalescing into a regional consortium called the “Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba.” The Six Federations represent approximately 45,000 families organized into almost 700 local unions. In 1996, women members formed their own organization.[18] Both the men’s and the women’s federations are organizationally and ideologically linked to national worker and campesino groups. They have become the most powerful popular social force in Bolivia and their political party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), consolidated in 1998, won 86% of Chapare votes in the 1999 municipal elections. In the 2002 general elections, support for the MAS spread to other campesino communities as well as urban areas throughout the country, the party won almost a quarter of the seats in Congress and MAS presidential candidate Evo Morales finished a close second.
USAID has purposely circumvented the participation of established coca growers’ organizations in its programs by creating alternative organizational structures, called “associations,” which have generated considerable suspicion among campesinos. This tactic mirrors attempts by Bolivian governments since the 1950s to create parallel organizations to control rural populations.[19] Even politically conservative Chapare campesinos opposed to the coca unions are not optimistic about the viability of the associations as economic development organizations.[20] Some associations exist on paper only, and many association members maintain their ties with the coca grower unions to minimize their risks by keeping a foot in both camps.[21] In other cases, campesinos drop out of the associations but their names stay on the membership rolls.
Two initiatives largely outside the U.S. purview have brought new dynamics into the alternative development mix. The first is the 1994 Law of Popular Participation. The Bolivian Congress adopted the law as part of an administrative decentralization package similar to those promoted elsewhere by international financial institutions. For the first time in history, 20% of national tax revenues went to municipal governments along with responsibility for local public infrastructure and services. In rural areas lacking local government structures, the law established new municipalities. What made this decentralization unusual was the inclusion of mechanisms for participatory planning and fiscal oversight by community organizations. The government recognized pre-existing groups or facilitated the formation of almost 15,000 grassroots organizations, including urban neighborhood organizations, pre-Hispanic indigenous formations and modern campesino unions. In instances where local organizations are strong and/or backed by nongovernmental organizations able to provide technical expertise while supporting grassroots leadership, the Law of Popular Participation has, to a limited degree, succeeded in providing benefits to underserved populations. In many municipalities, however, elites have successfully appropriated these fresh resources, effectively decentralizing the country’s endemic corruption and entrenching traditional power structures.[22]
More positively, however, the law provided coca growers the opportunity to participate in formal government structures for the first time. Coca grower representatives won the 1995 elections in the five new municipalities and sub-municipalities created by the law. Subsequent municipal planning in the Chapare has involved higher levels of community participation than in most of the country. This is largely due to the sustained consultation and consensus with unified, sophisticated coca grower unions that represent the vast majority of these municipalities’ constituents. Observers generally agree that municipalities function better and more honestly in the Chapare than anywhere else in the country.[23]
The other initiative that influenced the Chapare’s alternative development dynamic began in 1998, when the European Union (E.U.) undertook its Chapare Alternative Development Program, or PRAEDAC by its Spanish initials. One program component—widely considered its most successful—aims to strengthen municipal administrative capacity and provides the municipalities with an average of 30% of their budget. The E.U.’s approach reflects recommendations made by hundreds of experts on alternative development, including USAID representatives, at an international conference held in Germany in January 2002.[24]
Distinguishing the E.U. program most markedly from USAID’s is its willingness to work with local organizations in the Chapare without demanding coca eradication. In reference to the E.U. program Felipe Cáceres, the Mayor of the town of Villa Tunari, maintains, “In eight years, with one-fourth of the money, the municipalities have achieved 10 times what [US]AID has accomplished in 20 years.”[25] Nonetheless, the U.S. Embassy placed substantial pressure on the E.U. to work through the USAID-backed associations instead of the municipal governments.[26] USAID works with 84 other municipalities throughout Bolivia, but until April 2004 it refused to collaborate with Chapare governments, except in one small road project. In the Yungas coca-growing region, for example, USAID has worked with various municipalities, among them some controlled by the MAS, training municipal government employees, building potable water systems, funding college scholarships and strengthening coffee production.
Coca growers insist that despite all the past problems, they are willing to work with USAID. Felipe Cáceres recently stated:
It would be wonderful if [US]AID operated through the municipalities like they are supposed to under Bolivian law. The road maintenance work has been a great success so far. I have seen more flexibility lately—this is the first time in 20 years there is a positive change. If 100% of alternative development funds came through the municipality on the basis of a planning process in which the campesinos themselves decide the destination of the funds, I can assure you, excess coca would disappear. Most cocaleros [coca growers] don’t understand drug trafficking and don’t want to have anything to do with it, but they don’t want to eradicate the little they have, because they can’t afford to lose this income. My whole life has been involved in this, and this awful situation has to change. I really want something else for my children.[27]
In spring 2003, attempts by the U.S. Embassy to link Bolivian coca growers to leftist Colombian guerrilla groups became explicit. U.S. officials continue to publicly express concerns about what they call “narco-terrorism” in the Chapare, providing additional justification for militarization. Although security force commanders in the region cite the increased sophistication of exploding booby traps, they do not accuse terrorists of operating in the region.[28] In 2003 and 2004 district attorneys filed terrorism charges against more than 100 Chapare coca growers. Prosecutors have not presented compelling evidence, and some has clearly been fabricated. Six of those charged are still in jail and none of the cases have come to trial.
The first three months of the Mesa administration were peaceful in much of the country, but in the Chapare three security officers were killed. In apparent retaliation, the armed forces burned the homes of 25 coca growers and tortured three coca growers detained on terrorism charges. Calm returned during the first half of 2004, largely as a result of the growers’ strategic focus on the December 2004 municipal elections and their decision to give the Mesa administration some breathing room. The destruction of a key bridge by floodwaters effectively blocked the highway for four months, providing a de facto road blockade that limited access for eradication missions. Yet the underlying problems in the Chapare remain unresolved, as the basic policy of militarized eradication without sufficient economic alternatives is unchanged.
In the absence of significant income from alternative development, producers have quickly replanted in the Chapare and coca production has increased in the Yungas region as well. In March 2004, the U.S. State Department reported that Yungas coca production rose by 26% and that nationwide production rose 17% beyond 2002 estimates.[29] Resistance to drug war policies is growing concomitantly with the crops in the Yungas. Well aware of the consequences of U.S. policy in the Chapare, coca growers blocked the sole road into the Yungas, as their counterparts had done in the Chapare, for three days to protest the U.S.-financed construction of a drug control base at La Rinconada. Although the Mesa administration initially agreed to halt construction, it changed its stance a week later, citing heavy pressure from the U.S. Embassy.
During the Yungas blockades, Ambassador Greenlee announced that USAID was planning to expand its working relationship with Chapare municipalities, though it still would not work directly with the unions. A 2003 USAID Conflict Vulnerability Assessment suggested that a strategy increasing municipal participation could de-escalate conflict and recommended expanding USAID’s successful municipal strengthening and training program to the Chapare.[30] Current plans, however, allow for only about a third of USAID’s projects to be coordinated with the municipalities, and the projects will remain under the control of the same USAID contractors that the coca growers accuse of excessive and careless spending.
Promised changes are slow in coming. Coca growers began vigils around eradication camps last September, protesting the failure to implement the proposed alternative development strategy. Confrontations ensued, resulting in the death of one coca grower and injuries to both growers and members of the security forces. After almost three weeks of tension, the Bolivian government signed a landmark agreement with coca growers permitting 3,200 hectares of coca to remain in the region for one year. Coca growers agreed to voluntarily eradicate approximately 3,000 hectares of coca by the end of the year to meet an 8,000-hectare eradication quota. The accord signed on October 3 represents a dramatic departure from the stilted efforts at dialogue that the U.S. government has impeded since the 1998 initiation of Plan Dignidad. Uncharacteristically, U.S. Embassy officials did not reject the accord outright. The agreement contains many potential pitfalls and areas for future misunderstanding, but the greater flexibility demonstrated by the Bolivian government, coca growers and the U.S. Embassy has provided a viable short-term solution to the present conflict and much-needed breathing space to seek more enduring proposals.
Despite the high social costs of the militarized forced eradication program, the price, purity and availability of cocaine entering the U.S. have remained steady. Increased coca production in Peru and Colombia has more than replaced quantities eradicated in Bolivia, demonstrating once again the validity of the balloon theory, which asserts that coca suppressed in one area expands into another in response to ongoing demand.[31] Nonetheless, Bolivian governments face strong and ongoing U.S. pressure to continue the so-called “Bolivian success story.” Yet, success is always measured in terms of coca eradicated and not by the well-being of the Bolivian people. Back in the Chapare, where coca leaves are openly sold even at anti-drug checkpoints, coca growers and soldiers alike catch their breath and await the inevitable renewal of conflict and violence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Linda Farthing is a journalist and editor who lived for seven years in Bolivia. She is co-founder of the Andean Information Network (AIN), which monitors U.S. drug control policy in Bolivia www.ain.org.bo. Kathryn Ledebur is the Cochabamba-based director of AIN and a consultant to international human rights organizations on drug war issues. She has lived and worked in Bolivia for 14 years.
NOTES
Thanks to Ben Kohl, Thea Luna and Megan Tatman for reviewing this article.
1. Encuesta de Opinión: Fuerzas armadas: Realidad y perspectiva institucional, Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Unidad de Análisis de Políticas de Defensa, 1998, p. 21. The broad-based study is based on the survey of a representative sample of approximately 10% of the members of the armed forces with even distribution in terms of branch membership, rank, age and posting.
2. Washington Office on Latin America/Andean Information Network, interview: Juan Ramón Quintana, November 18, 2002.
3. “Bolivia’s Coca Crops,” The New York Times, October 22, 2003.
4. “Bolivian Leader Seeks More Money to Quell Unrest,” The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2003.
5. Author interview, May 2004.
6. Kathryn Ledebur, “Coca and Conflict in the Chapare,” Washington Office on Latin America, 2002. Ben Kohl and Linda Farthing, “The Price of Success: Bolivia’s War against Drugs and the Poor,” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 35 no.1, 2001, pp. 35-41. Human Rights Watch, “Bolivia under Pressure: Human Rights Violations and Coca Eradication,” 1996. Bjorn Pettersson and Lesley MacKay, “Human Rights Violations Stemming from the ‘War on Drugs’ in Bolivia,” Andean Information Network, 1993.
7. “In US Drug War, Ally Bolivia Loses Ground to Coca Farmers,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2003.
8. USAID, “Terms of Reference, Assessment of USAID-Bolivia Alternative Development Strategy,” 2003, p. 5.
9. Campesino unions, called “sindicatos” in Bolivia, exist to varying degrees throughout the country. They are generally found where strong traditional organizations have been destroyed or undermined. They are affiliated at a national level with the Confederation of Bolivian Campesino Workers (CSUTCB).
10. See, for example, General Accounting Office (GAO), “Drug Control Efforts to Develop Alternatives to Cultivating Illicit Crops in Colombia have made little Progress and face Serious Obstacles,” 2002.
11. Section 568 of the U.S. Foreign Appropriations Act.
12. U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – 2003,” February 25, 2004, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27887.htm.
13. U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – 2003.”
14. “Memorandum: Flawed State Department Report on Human Rights
