OVER THE PAST 500 YEARS A HANDFUL
of deities has played havoc with Latin America.
They have swept through nations, uprooting communi-
ties and transforming the lay of the land. They have
altered peoples’ diets and dreams, determined how they
live and how they die. The first of these devil-gods was
silver. Since then, they have come and gone in succes-
sion: guano, rubber, tin, sugar, cotton…In the late 1970s,
a junior deity since the heyday of silver established a
reign of its own: Coca, the raw material for cocaine, has
wreaked vast and permanent changes across the South
American continent.
Freelance journalist Jo Ann Kawell spent two years
in Peru and Bolivia researching material for this Report.
The picture she paints is astounding. While coca has
become these nations’ economic mainstay, the United
States has thrown itself with single-minded zeal into the
complex and violent politics of the coca-growing re-
gions, ignoring the scope of the problem and the depth
of commitment a solution would require.
The primary objective of U.S. drug control policy is
to eradicate the plant itself before it can be harvested and
turned into cocaine. Digging up the plots of defenseless
peasants may sound easier than taking on the interna-
tional drug mafia. But by attacking the livelihood of
coca farmers, U.S. policy has driven them to support the
ruthless Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, and given rise to
mass labor unrest in Bolivia. And it has achieved, fi-
nally, a continual growth in the quantity of the drug
produced. Farmers are simply going farther into the vast
wilderness to plant ever more coca.
T HE MORAL BLINDERS MOST OF US WEAR
tend to hide the essentials of the drug trade. Coca
and cocaine are not devils, any more than they are gods.
They are commodities and the drug trade is a multina-
tional industry like any other. “Supply-side” drug con-
trol policy places blame and responsibility on those who
have little control over their economies or their lives.
12
Under the free enterprise system, which has kept the
continent in a hopeless cycle of dependence on boom-
and-bust exports like coca, the demand of wealthy na-
tions is a force that Latin America and the Caribbean
have no power to resist. As with past commodity booms,
coca has reoriented the societies of producer nations to
such a degree that survival would be difficult, seemingly
impossible, without it. It has brought fantastic wealth to
a few, and a shimmer of prosperity to the regions where
the leaf is grown. But the shifting of Peru’s and Bo-
livia’s dependence to coca has done little for long-term
development and less for increasing those nations’ con-
trol over their destinies.
The economic forces governing cocaine are the same
as those which ruled coffee, tea,sugar and tobacco 300
years ago, argues Sidney W. Mintz. The difference is
that cocaine causes a decline in worker productivity and
consumption, and “respectable” capitalists and the state
are unable to claim any share of the profits. This “may
be at least as irritating as the presence of so toxic a
substance in the public schools.”
WRAPPING ITSELF IN THE FLAG OF LAW
enforcement, the United States has built a con-
sensus for intervention which could prove irresistible.
Congressional and public clamor for results have led to
the commitment of ever greater resources-financial,
human and military-to a policy which has failed mis-
erably and threatens to involve the United States in a
brutal and protracted shooting war. Until demand slacks
off, or poor farmers have a viable alternative, attempts
to stamp out coca will only accelerate the spiral of vio-
lence in the fields and on our streets.
Jo Ann Kawell is the former managing editor of
Pacifica Radio’s news service. Ratil Gonzilez writes for
the Lima bimonthly Quehacer and is a researcher at the
institute DESCO. Noted anthropologist and food histo-
rian Sidney W. Mintz’s most recent book is Sweetness
and Power (Penguin 1986).
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