Coco Essay

Coca is a plant coming from South America that for thousands of years been cultivated in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. The coca leaves have played, and still play, key social, medicinal, and ritual purposes for millions of indigenous people living in the Central and North Andes and Amazonia. Coca is a mild stimulant, however, it has been criminalized and equated with cocaine. It was not until 1855, when a German scientist fabricated cocaine, the laboratory-produced alkaloid separated from coca leaves. This formerly licit commodity was transformed into an illicit drug, due to the influence of Western morals and behavior. In Bolivia, the transformation of coca has drastically affected the peasantry in the region, altering social discourses, local and national economies, as well as traditional, indigenous practices. Today, coca cocaine as a commodity employs billions of people, this is an economy of its own, but the lines of legal and illegal cross and blur.

The commodity chain for coca/cocaine is vast and complicated. Coca frontiers for illicit export spread massively into the deep jungle of the Huallaga Valley and Bolivia’s Chapare. This is where most coca plants are grown and harvested, and occasionally transformed into coca paste. In the past, most of the raw coca leaves or coca paste was transported to Colombia where well-located entrepreneurs, under a weak state, consolidated as the core middlemen in this trade. Colombians refined coca and marked up the prices of the Bolivian peasant product. In the 1980s, Mexico became a transit point for cocaine heading to the United States and other Western nations for sale by Mexican or Colombian suppliers (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994: 195). However, due to the illicit and clandestine na...

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...al tensions between the US and Bolivia regarding counter-drug cooperation continue.

Bolivia is, a poor, debt-ridden country, is caught in the grip of an expanding drug economy and an illusion of economic development. Questions arise, “about the inequality in society, about who holds the power in society,” (Nordstrom 2007: 152) remain unanswered. Despite the substantial flow of dollars, jobs and income, it has been at the cost of major social and cultural changes. Given Bolivia's increasing economic dependency in the world economy, it is unlikely that this trend will slow down or that conditions will improve in the near future—not at least until cocaine consumption in the United States declines substantially. However, Bolivia is making unconventional advances when it's anti-drug policies, by understanding the relationship between licit coca and illicit cocaine.