Pubdate: Thu, 06 Mar 2003
Source: Harvard University Gazette (MA Edu)
Copyright: 2003, the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Contact: (617) 495-0754
Website: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2841
Author: Alvin Powell 
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Bolivia
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

BOLIVIAN PEASANTS SUFFER IN DRUG WAR, SPEAKER SAYS:

Coca Plant's Traditional Uses Make Indigenous Peasants Targets

What America bills as a "War on Drugs" at home is executed as a war on
peasants in the Bolivian Andes, the leader of a peasant coalition told a
Kennedy School of Government audience on Friday (Feb. 28).

"Defending coca for [us] is defending [our] land, it's the same struggle.
It's defending our culture, our health," said Leonida Zurita Vargas, leader
of the National Federation of Women Peasants in Bolivia. "We are fighting
against the eradication of our culture."

Zurita, speaking Spanish with an English translator, addressed about 40
people crowded into the Center for International Development's Perkins Room
during a lunchtime talk that lasted more than an hour.

Zurita, who took part in the Bridge-Builders Conference at Harvard earlier
in February, described the experience of Bolivia's indigenous peasants for
whom coca is a traditional plant. Those peasants are caught in the
crosshairs of the U.S. and Bolivian governments' war against the trade in
cocaine, which is made from coca leaves.

In addition to its use for illegal drugs, however, Zurita said the plant is
commonly grown in peasant kitchen gardens and its leaves are used to make
tea, cakes, and natural medicines, and are used in ritual fortune-telling.
Coca leaves are also used as part of the local economy, and can be traded to
buy potatoes and other staples, she said.

Leonida Zurita Vargas, head of Bolivia's National Federation of Women
Peasants, talks about the place of the coca leaf in Andean culture.
Listening in the background are Evren Paclioglu (left) and Indhira Santos,
both in the KSG Public Administration in International Development Masters
Program. (Staff photo by Kris Snibbe)

The government's opposition to peasant coca cultivation has had various
impacts, she said. In the late 1980s, the government instituted a voluntary
program where peasants were compensated for reducing their coca production
and planting other crops. The government paid peasant families between $300
and $2,500 to help them purchase bananas, pineapples, and other plants, but
prices subsequently fell dramatically to the point where a peasant would
have to sell 60 pineapples to earn just one dollar.

"The whole alternative development program has been a complete failure,"
Zurita said.

The low prices for other crops prompted many peasants to return to planting
coca, Zurita said. The Bolivian government raised the stakes in 1998 with a
coca eradication plan, which has effectively militarized Zurita' native
Chapare region. The search for coca and drug traffickers has resulted in the
military investigating schools and teachers and searching private homes. If
families have a mountain bike or other expensive items, Zurita said, they
are assumed to be involved in the drug trade and their homes are burned
down.

Across the region, she said, there have been rapes and other human rights
violations. The peasants, meanwhile, don't know their rights. For example,
she said, it wasn't until she joined the union that she learned that the
police had to ask permission to enter a home and search.

The result has been violent blockades by peasants at which both peasants and
police have died.

Last fall, the peasant unions began negotiating with the government for a
stop in the eradication program if they increase the planting of other
crops. They're also looking for a study of the legal uses of the coca leaf
so the plant can continue to play a role in the local economy.

Part of the problem, however, is U.S. government pressure on the Bolivian
government to continue the war on drugs. That's why Zurita brought her story
to the United States. She urged people in the audience to spread the word
that the coca plant is not the same as cocaine. She said she needs help to
"de-Satanize" the coca plant. Trying to eliminate coca is to Bolivian
peasants, said Zurita, as trying to ban the grape would be to wine-drinkers
in the United States.

She also asked for help in stopping alternative development projects, which,
she said, are not only a failure in the field, but also see much of their
funds siphoned off into the pockets of unscrupulous government officials.
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