COCA The Real Green Revolution
OVER THE PAST 500 YEARS A HANDFUL of deities has played havoc with Latin America. They have swept through nations, uprooting communities and transforming the lay of the land. They have altered...
...Supply-side" drug control policy places blame and responsibility on those who have little control over their economies or their lives...
...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 regions, ignoring the scope of the problem and the depth of commitment a solution would require...
...But the shifting of Peru's and Bolivia's dependence to coca has done little for long-term development and less for increasing those nations' control over their destinies...
...Since then, they have come and gone in succession: 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...
...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...
...Jo Ann Kawell is the former managing editor of Pacifica Radio's news service...
...drug control policy is to eradicate the plant itself before it can be harvested and turned into cocaine...
...Freelance journalist Jo Ann Kawell spent two years in Peru and Bolivia researching material for this Report...
...Coca and cocaine are not devils, any more than they are gods...
...This "may be at least as irritating as the presence of so toxic a substance in the public schools...
...The picture she paints is astounding...
...It has brought fantastic wealth to a few, and a shimmer of prosperity to the regions where the leaf is grown...
...Until demand slacks off, or poor farmers have a viable alternative, attempts to stamp out coca will only accelerate the spiral of violence in the fields and on our streets...
...Farmers are simply going farther into the vast wilderness to plant ever more coca...
...Ratil Gonzilez writes for the Lima bimonthly Quehacer and is a researcher at the institute DESCO...
...The primary objective of U.S...
...But by attacking the livelihood of coca farmers, U.S...
...WRAPPING ITSELF IN THE FLAG OF LAW enforcement, the United States has built a consensus for intervention which could prove irresistible...
...12 Under the free enterprise system, which has kept the continent in a hopeless cycle of dependence on boomand-bust exports like coca, the demand of wealthy nations is a force that Latin America and the Caribbean have no power to resist...
...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 miserably and threatens to involve the United States in a brutal and protracted shooting war...
...T HE MORAL BLINDERS MOST OF US WEAR tend to hide the essentials of the drug trade...
...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...
...They have altered peoples' diets and dreams, determined how they live and how they die...
...Digging up the plots of defenseless peasants may sound easier than taking on the international drug mafia...
...They are commodities and the drug trade is a multinational industry like any other...
...And it has achieved, finally, a continual growth in the quantity of the drug produced...
...The economic forces governing cocaine are the same as those which ruled coffee, tea,sugar and tobacco 300 years ago, argues Sidney W. Mintz...
...Noted anthropologist and food historian Sidney W. Mintz's most recent book is Sweetness and Power (Penguin 1986...
...policy has driven them to support the ruthless Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, and given rise to mass labor unrest in Bolivia...
...The first of these devil-gods was silver...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 6
