Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy: Leopards

The Bolivian Cocaine Coup of 1980 was not a lasting achievement. It was simply too transparent. Carter's State Department raised hell, as did Congress, the more politic elements of Carter's DEA, the OAS, the enormously powerful Catholic Church and the Bolivian labor confederations.

The U.S. withdrew all overt military and economic aid. This caused another three cosmetic coups, which were seen for the shams they were. So, in October 1982, Hernán Siles-Zuazo, who had been duly elected in June of 1980, was allowed to resume the presidency. This enabled the Reagan administration to resume "anti-narcotics" aid to the Bolivian Army. Siles-Zuaso, President from 1956-1960, had been a leader of the 1952 social revolution.

A highland coquero with gourd and stick for adding lejía to his cheek wad

Immediately after the installation of Siles-Zuaso, the DEA funded, armed and organized the Bolivian Leopards, UMOPAR, Unidad Movil de Patrullaje Rural, the Mobile Rural Patrol Unit. UMOPAR was administered by the Special Antinarcotics Force, the core group of military assassins that ran the Cocaine Coup.

The first thing the Leopards tried, in 1984, was the overthrow of the government, but the more nationalistic elements of Bolivia's power-elite, and the CIA, decided that was not a good idea. The DEA then concentrated on building an efficient "democratic" police state. It sent the Green Berets to train the Leopards, and funded the creation of courts, police intelligence gathering facilities and an army of prosecutors.

By threatening Bolivia's international credit and foreign aid, the DEA was able to force passage of the 1988 Coca and Controlled Substance Law, "Law 1008." For the first time in history, Bolivia's most sacred and profitable crop was criminalized - except in specified, supposedly ever-shrinking, areas. At this time coca was earning 50% of Bolivia's foreign exchange.

Law 1008 had the effect of increasing coca's value and therefore the acreage devoted to it. Between 1963 and 1987 Bolivian coca acreage increased 20-fold. Because Prohibition artificially inflates the price, a pound of Bolivian coca is literally worth twice what a pound of Bolivian tin is worth. Bolivian coca and cocaine exports consistently exceed the multi-billion dollar value of Bolivian tin exports.

That is, solely because of the artificial illegal value, cocaine is Bolivia's number one industrial export, as it is Peru's. More people are employed in the illegal cocaine business in Bolivia and Peru - growing, processing, trucking, refining, protecting - than in all legal mining and manufacturing operations combined. That can hardly be called a criminal aberration. The artificial illegal value creates an export-oriented monoculture that otherwise wouldn't exist.

"Crop substitution" is a transparent sham to highland smallholders for whom coca is worth twenty times the value of any substitute ($9000 for coca to $500 for citrus per hectare in 1984). Since coca leaf can be cultivated year-round, and is harvested four times a year, highland coca production means year-round access to food and a cash income independent of agribusiness technology and banking. The DEA estimated that when it turned up the heat on coca production in the Tingo María area of Peru in 1972, the amount of acreage devoted to coca production shot from 4,000 to 50,000 by 1978. Effective enforcement, since it increases the commodity's value, is a stimulus to production.

A Cochabamba family coca plot; Cultural Survival

The increased value strengthened the neighboring Colombian coke and marijuana distribution apparatus, which runs vast jungle plantations and pays hundreds of thousands of campesinos ten times what they could make in equivalent legal work. Twenty years ago, Colombia grew almost no coca leaf; now, in 1999, it's the world's second largest grower, and the fourth largest source of opium. Because of its artifical value, global opium production shot from 1,000 metric tons in 1971 to 4,300 tons in 1996. In 1988 the Colombian cocaine industry employed 300,000 Colombians, earning 20% of the country's foreign exchange, $1.5 billion, as much as the country's biggest legal export, coffee. Just two years later, Colombian cocaine earned at least twice as much as Colombian coffee. Good ol' Juan Valdez.

"Even if you eradicate every coca plant on Colombian soil, you will simply raise prices and push production deeper into Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador," notes Colombian sociologist and author Alfredo Molano. "You will also bring misery and suffering to many thousands of people."

Since ipadú, the alkaloid-poor lowland variety of coca grown in Colombia, can be cultivated anywhere on the Amazonian jungle floor, even if it were possible to destroy coca production in the highlands, ipadú would fill the gap. The use of ipadú is ancient in Amazonia. In fact the word ipadú can refer to the lowland variety of coca itself or to the traditional toasted mixture of coca and yarumo leaves. The rain forest is being sliced up everywhere - in Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia - because of ipadú's new-found value. That is solely an effect of Prohibition. When alcohol Prohibition went into effect, my grandmother happily turned her kitchen into a brewery. The idiots had made it worth her while. Nobody was going to tell Grandma that her shabbas wine was a drug. She was damn proud of her home brew.

The thumb-sized coca leaves

My grandmother, of course, on New York's Lower East Side, had plenty of protection. Bolivian campesinos aren't always so lucky. Law 1008 is, in effect, the Leopard Bill of Rights. It gives these storm troopers the right to search anyone anytime, to charge them with unsubstantiated evidence, and to hold them in filthy concentration camps, real death camps, for years. San Sebastian, one of Cochabamba's prisons, was built to hold 60 people in its 10,000 square feet. As of 7/95, it held 520, who had to share 3 broken-down toilets. No food was served. If you ate, it was because family came to feed you. Originally, no bail was permitted before trial, and, according to Human Rights Watch/Americas, only 7% of the prison population of Cochabamba had been brought to trial.

Most Bolivian coca is grown either in the Chaparé or the Yungas region. About 7500 maceration pits in the central highlands of the Chaparé turn the coca leaves into cocaine paste or base. Paste is made simply by soaking the crushed leaves in kerosene and filtering out the precipitate grey goo with toilet paper. This paste can then be dissolved in sulphuric acid and potassium permanganate. That filtrate is then mixed with ammonium hydroxide, which precipitates out the cocaine base.

Highland coca leaf drying patio; Bulletin on Narcotics 4:2:1953

Either the paste or the base is then transported by the "ants" to only about 35 major dealers located in the Santa Cruz and Beni departments, who convert the base, with acetone and ether, to cocaine hydrochloride. These powerful dealers are never busted, though their jungle labs sometimes become the focus of contention. It is they who resell either the base or their own refined cocaine to the internationally fluent Colombians. Increasingly, these dealers are managing their own international distribution.

On April 18, 1995, in response to U.S. pressure to get tough on these damn narcoterrorists, Bolivia declared a "state of siege" and threw, not the dealers, but 400 peasant union leaders in jail without charges. The forests of the Chaparé began to ring with cucaracha sniper fire as the "ecological police" began to eradicate "unauthorized" coca production.

Article 79 provides for five years in prison for criticizing Law 1008 or defending the cultivation of coca in this country whose native population, the vast majority in the countryside, regard coca leaves not only as their bread and butter, but as the sacred eucharist, ante los conquistadores.

A lowland Amazonian ipadú coca grower