Bolivia Suffers under Plan Colombia

While traveling through South America recently, my wife and I crossed the border from Peru into Bolivia. Within the first 75 miles we became stuck in a nearly 4-hour shutdown of the Pan-American Highway 20 miles north of La Paz.

This was just one in a month-long series of highway shutdowns/blockades throughout the northern part of the country carried out by peasants, most of whom are Indiginos (indigenous people), who are protesting the Bolivian government's policy of coca eradication. This policy is strongly supported and funded by the United States under Plan Colombia.

Such support from the US has been ongoing since the Nixon administration, but has accelerated greatly since 1997,and has expanded further under Plan Columbia. Most Americans know the plan is sending $100 million to aid the efforts of the Colombian government to defeat guerrillas who allegedly protect and profit from the international coca trade--a policy whose cost and possibilities of success are a source of contention. (See "Colombia: The Next Crisis" this issue--ed.)

Beyond this, however, we are also sending increasing millions of dollars to Andean governments, especially Bolivia, in order to coerce them to greatly decrease coca production. Since 1997 coca production has decreased by about 75% in Bolivia, almost eliminating that part of the crop which goes to the international cocaine trade. Now, however, we want Bolivia to further decrease coca production. This is what the peasants are protesting, because hundreds of thousands of them make their living from its cultivation for domestic Bolivian consumption.

In Bolivia, as well as Peru and Ecuador, coca leaves are grown legally (although cocaine--chemically synthesized from coca--is illegal) and have been for centuries, and have been used for thousands of years. Indiginos use it the way we drink coffee and tea. In fact, tea is made from it in the Andes, with about as much effect on the human nervous system or as much social disruption as coffee in the US. Coca has long been chewed in small amounts in the high altitudes of the Andes Mountains in order for daily work to proceed. It is therefore an important domestic cash crop. Beyond this, the Andean Indiginos still consider it a sacred crop granted to them by the Gods.

Yet American policy makers seem wholly indifferent to these beliefs and unsympathetic to the plight of our impoverished South American neighbors. Our government's only concern is to eliminate world coca production ostensibly to lessen North American cocaine consumption and abuse. (Imagine if China demanded that our farmers stop growing tobacco because millions of their citizens smoke too much.)

The protesting Bolivian peasants understand, and are reacting to, what any thoughtful North American already knows: that cocaine abuse is a North American problem--not a South American one. We should accept that fact and not push the problem off on the poorest inhabitants of our hemisphere.

At the minimum we could agree to favor imports of legal agricultural products from Andean nations so as to allow peasants whose livelihoods are threatened some alternative crops for income. (This, however, conflicts with our present globalization philosophy of free trade--but that is another issue).

Better yet, we would have much better success if we spent Bolivia's Plan Colombia money--as well as the money spent incarcerating small time users--on funding drug treatment programs and drug education in hospitals, schools, and in places of employment. Notably, the few such programs that currently exist are due to be cut drastically or eliminated this year to balance budgets at the federal, state, and local levels.

--Robert A. Doan, with additional material from Maria Tomchick