30 CultureShock! Bolivia
in a nation of over nine million, Bolivia’s deposit base is
concentrated in the hands of 45,000 people who control 85
per cent of all deposits in the banking system.
In the absence of any viable alternative economy, displaced
miners had no choice but to grow the controversial leaf in
Chapare, whose production has been considered in excess
of the legal needs supplied by Los Yungas producers. Every
dollar of coca base and cocaine products requires local inputs
of only US$ 0.03, as opposed to agricultural goods requiring
US$ 0.13, or other sectors of the economy, which call for up
to US$ 0.23. It is cheaper to produce coca, but this product
provides far fewer jobs than alternative crops.
The coca growers, the lowest participants in the drug
hierarchy, are often the objects of sympathy from upstanding
citizens who do not like cocaine traders but who harbour a
greater resentment against a failed US anti-drug policy. Bolivia
suffered little of the violence associated with the drug trade
in places like the US and Colombia. “I don’t think our society
is violent and never has been,” explained René Blattmann,
former Minister of Justice.
This aversion to violence in Bolivia led to resentment
against the US-trained Bolivian anti-drug forces who have
been responsible for the occasional deaths of innocent
residents in Cochabamba’s Chapare coca producing region,
including women and children.Cocaine: a Western Invention
Further complicating the issue is the fact that the coca leaf was
a native product of Bolivia many centuries before cocaine’s
existence. Cocaine is a Western invention, originating in Germany
and made famous by none other than Sigmund Freud.During the 1990s, in order to meet the US quota for
coca eradication, the Bolivian government used aid money
to pay coca growers US$ 2,500 per eradicated hectare.
But in the absence of markets for alternative produce,
many growers simply retreated deeper into the jungle
to plant coca.