Like any good late-night radio show host, I do take requests. And I had a couple folks ask me to drop in some of the Latin America section. I’ll return in a day or two to the temperance movement and can’t thank you guys enough for the comments. You caught some things that otherwise would have gotten past me and helped with some context on the movement’s motives and global reach.

One thing to remember while reading: I’m a reporter, not an academic or an expert on drug policy. So if in places I miss it pretty badly, feel free to call me out and I’ll go back and do more reporting to try to make it as accurate as possible.

On to the excerpt…

The uprising began slowly, with a several-mile march from El Alto to La Paz. It had taken thousands of cocaleros, campesinos, miners, and other protesters about a week to hike to La Paz. The miners had brought their dynamite, which they tossed here and there throughout the day. Occasionally, a bomb of serious weight rocked the city.

I had come to Bolivia to discover the impact on the country of the coca trade and American efforts against it, and I’d come just as tensions were rising. The specific issue that had galvanized these marchers was control of the country’s natural-gas resources. But it was Evo Morales, then the head of a cocalero union, who led the march. Without him and the coca growers, the protest would likely be nothing more than a marginal demonstration leading to a march around town, a few speeches, and a natural-gas law written by oil companies.

The day after protesters arrived in La Paz, I accompanied about 2,000 Aymara Indians from the high plains on a smaller march. Along the way, they methodically smashed the windows of stores and cars, often with the passengers still inside. “¡Cabrón!” shouted one minibus driver as glass poured over his riders.

The march ended in a standoff with police a block away from the presidential palace. I was with a group of four journalists when a miner tossed what seemed to be a stick of dynamite at us. It exploded a foot behind me. The force rocked me forward, but it was all air—just a blasting cap.

Bottles started to fly, followed by rocks. The police raised their riot shields and held their ground. Then another explosive was tossed at the feet of three soldiers, who blocked its effects with their shields. Then they raised their guns, and we ran. I saw tear-gas canisters fly by, but soon there was little visibility. I could hear the hiss of gas as it filled the street. A rubber bullet hit me in the back.

A block away, the police fired tear gas again. There was more running. I snapped a picture of a crowd coming toward me, turned, and was punched hard in the back. I pretended it didn’t happen and kept my pace. Surrounded by angry Indians and painfully aware of my whiteness, I ducked down an alley and there managed to avoid any more random blows.

Within a few blocks. I became separated from Christian Parenti, a journalist friend with whom I was traveling. I stumbled blindly through the streets

“Ryan?” said a voice through the haze. “Ryan, are you OK?”

“Lucia?”

“Sí. ¡Ven conmigo!” The voice belonged to the secretary of a man Christian and I’d met earlier in the day, Sen. Antonio Peredo. A leader in Morales’ party, he’s the younger brother of Inti and Coco Peredo, who with Che Guevara hoped to spark a socialist revolution in Bolivia in the ’60s. The CIA chased them around the jungle, ultimately catching and killing Guevara. “I was too young too join them,” Antonio had told us in his office, which was decorated with at least three portraits of Che.

Lucia took me to her apartment, where she gave me a cigarette—the first I’d had in 13 years. On the news the night before, I’d seen a public-service announcement reminding Bolivians that cigarettes are the best remedy for tear gas. My eyes and lungs quickly cleared up.

I headed back into the streets and managed to meet up with Christian. In Plaza San Francisco, a protester shouted at us: “¡Gringos se culpa! ¡Gringos se culpa!”

“Sí, sí, we’re guilty,” Christian said, not quieting the man down. A police officer—one in a line of 10—walked our way. The man turned to the cop and launched a brick-sized rock at him, hitting him in the face mask. The cops raised their weapons, and I heard myself yelling at them not to shoot. A second later, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to reason with them. As Christian dove to the ground, I turned and ran as well as I could. The spent tear-gas canisters I’d been collecting weighed me down, and I felt a little absurd securing them in my pocket while fresh ones were flying around us.

A canister rocketed by my left arm, its trail spreading slowly around us. I ducked behind a wall and peered over. All around me, Indian men and women were stoically gushing tears and passing a cigarette back and forth. Those who try to run have canisters and rubber bullets fired their way.

La Paz was designed in the 1500s to withstand attacks from outside, and there are only a few ways to get in. There are also, much to the chagrin of some former heads of state, very few ways to get out. Several thousand protesters can slow the city significantly; tens of thousands, as there were in the spring of 2005, can bring it to its knees.

After vowing not to resign, President Carlos Mesa stepped down on June 6. A few days later, Bolivian legislators took flight from the besieged capital to select a new president in Sucre, nearly 500 miles to the southeast. But demonstrators had other ideas. Blockades were lifted so that truckloads of protesters could race to Sucre to prevent parliament from naming right-wing senate leader Hormando Vaca Diez, Washington’s friend in La Paz, as the successor to Mesa. The Mayors of El Alto and La Paz announced hunger strikes to oppose Vaca Diez, whom, a poll revealed, was supported by only 16 percent of Bolivians.

Parliament’s morning session was canceled as miners, coca growers, and other protesters battled police in the streets. According to news reports, several legislators urged the cancellation of the session so that they could fly out of Sucre before demonstrators took over the airport. They didn’t move quickly enough. In protest of Vaca Diez, airport workers went on strike. Now stuck in Sucre, parliament met again around midnight, and then gave in. Vaca Diez resigned his constitutional right to ascend to the presidency, as did the next in line, Marlo Cossio. At 11:47 p.m. on June 10, the man whom protesters had been demanding as a caretaker president, Supreme Court leader Eduardo Rodriguez, was sworn in, with elections scheduled for several months later.

Protest leader Morales became president on January 22, 2006, and he soon went on an international tour to promote coca. As the elected leader of a developed nation, he doesn’t exactly fit the image of the drug marketeer as typified by Tony Montana or Al Capone. Still, Morales is probably right to call himself “America’s worst nightmare.” He is, at the very least, America’s greatest challenge to its preconceived notions of the international drug trade. The idea that the Mafia or some other organized underworld syndicate is in glamorous command of the world drug market is held not just by the HBO-watching public and the media, but also by law enforcement and the federal government.

The truth is much less romantic, but it helps explain the relationship between drug trends and cultural mood. The international drug trade, involving countless users, producers, distributors, agents, and middle men, is, by virtue of its illegality, a largely free market. That makes it highly susceptible to changes in the habits and tastes of consumers, whether they stem from national drug policies, economic forces, or merely our collective whim. And when the drug market shifts even slightly, the effects can be profound and surprising: a well-funded Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan, a brutal military dictatorship in Burma, a 40-year civil war in Colombia.

Or a leftist uprising in Bolivia, the seeds of which were sown over the previous two decades. In 1988, in response to long-standing U.S. disapproval of local coca cultivation, the Bolivian government put a cap on the amount of the plant that could be grown legally, vowing to wipe out the illegal portion of the crop. In 1997, President Hugo Banzer developed a national plan for crop destruction. Washington contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort, which succeeded not only in reducing the number of coca plants grown in Bolivia, but also in lowering the already low standard of living among the country’s peasant farmers. An attempt to introduce alternative crops such as pineapple, animal feed, and tea, estimated to cost more than $800 million, faltered along with the Bolivian economy. Prices for those alternatives were simply too low fro growers to bother, thanks in part to U.S. subsidization of domestic farmers. The food-price hikes that began in 2008 could alter the calculus. Prices more than tripled that year in Afghanistan, causing some farmers to switch from poppies to wheat.

In the Chapare province of Bolivia, where coca has been grown for centuries, Christian and I met a woman who had been shot in the back while running toward her coca field to protect it. Several years later, she was still growing—our jeep was forced off the road to drive around her drying crop. For the small farmers who produce the raw materials for much of the world’s drug supply, violence is less of a threat than poverty. The woman’s husband, who stood outside their, splintering, dirt-floored shack, didn’t seem very political. He’s a member of Morales’ party because he, like a U.S. auto worker, is required to be. But he doesn’t often attend meetings. What does he think of the natural-gas issue? “I cook with wood,” he said in Spanish. “Why would I care about gas?”

Naturally, some of the principal risks associated with an illegal enterprise are that the owner or his employees could be shot, arrested, jailed, have their assets seized, or experience some other interference from law enforcement. The greater the size of an operation, the higher the risk, and therefore the more expensive the enterprise, because that risk must be accounted for. Employees must be paid commensurate with risk, otherwise they might take an equally well-paying job in a less perilous trade—if such a job is available. In Bolivia in the mid-’90s, just before Banzer’s Plan Dignidad (“Dignity Plan”) when into effect, growing fruit netted a small farmer several hundred dollars less per acre than growing coca. At the time, about 10 percent of the country’s work force was involved in the drug trade in some way, with more than 6 percent of the gross domestic product resulting from cocaine trafficking. Today, some of that business has shifted to Peru and Colombia, but coca remains the backbone of the peasant economy.

Risk is why the drug market is decentralized. The bigger an operation, the greater need for expensive cautionary measures such as payoffs to law-enforcement officials and politicians. Trafficking high volumes is also risky, because one seizure can result in losses large enough to  threaten the viability of the entire organization. Witness the enormous seizures of cocaine in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in 2007, which were likely the result of tips to law enforcement from warring cartels. If the entire U.S. cocaine import in a given year is around 500 metric tons, then the one-time loss of more than 20 metric tons is a significant drop in someone’s revenue.
 
Prohibition also puts pressure on a company’s cash flow and access to credit. Because banks can’t be used with impunity by illegitimate businesses, employees and agents must be trusted to carry large amounts of cash—and, of course, to skim some off the top. And larger amounts of cash are proportionally more difficult to transport. In the spring of 2007, Mexico seized more than $200 million in one raid. That’s a massive loss even to a legit multinational corporation. The legitimacy of a drug operation’s cash is an issue, too. Money laundering is a service: Clients pay a fee to make dirty money clean. Above-board corporations get quite different economic treatment, with banks and other investment agencies paying for the privilege of holding the company’s money.
 
More important, perhaps, is that it’s tough for an illegal enterprise to get a loan. Certainly there are lenders out there—most of them illegal themselves—willing to take a risk on a bookie or a drug producer or distributor. But their increased risk is accounted for in the borrower’s paying higher interest rates than a business with auditable books could expect from a bank—and for smaller amounts of capital, too. And a cartel can’t go public with shares of its business to raise fresh funds. Without access to credit and capital markets, an organization must grow by reinvesting its profits. That’s not impossible in a lucrative industry, but it’s a relatively slow road to riches.

When a distributor can break out of the credit trap, the results can be dramatic. In the early ’80s, the suppliers of California trafficker Ricky Ross—known as “Freeway Rick”—began to provide him with a line of credit in the form of product that was delivered up front but paid for only when sold. Partly thanks to that advantage, Ross was able to spread his crack-cocaine operation throughout Los Angeles and then across the country. It’s not surprising that his suppliers could afford to give him such a valuable benefit: They were representatives of the Contras, a right-wing insurgent group created and armed by the United States to battle leftists in Central America. The protection they received from the CIA—as well as the use of airplanes and landing space—enabled them to greatly cut their operating costs.
 
University of Maryland professor Peter Reuter notes that prohibition makes illegal businesses difficult to sell, which would limit growth to the life of the owner. In theory, a business could be taken over by a relative—or by force—and continue apace, as long as the new owner knew what he was doing. But because employee loyalty is often to the owner himself—say, Pablo Escobar—rather than to the firm, the new boss might have some trouble keeping things together.
 
Escobar suggests what at first seems to be a counterargument, if the man’s operation was even a fraction the size of legend. In 1989, Forbes listed history’s favorite narcotrafficker as one of the world’s 10 richest people. Major Mexican cartels, too, don’t seem to find it hard to grow a business. Just two days after that $200 million seizure in Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a ship carrying 43,000 pounds of coke, which was visible in an aerial photo of the Panamanian-flagged vessel. The DEA estimated the seizure was worth $300 million. Clearly, somebody’s doing some business on a large scale—although it’s clearly not Bolivian coca growers or other subsistence-level producers of the drug trade’s raw materials.
 
Rather than refute Reuter’s theory, such spectacular examples support his notion that legal risk is the greatest limiter of firm size. In Colombia and Mexico, where the governments are exceptionally corrupt and a major dealer has only a small chance of getting busted, the market can be taken over by a few strong players. The bigger an operation in a corrupt country, the less likely it is to be busted because of its political power. Smaller firms are more likely to be taken down, both as a favor to the larger cartels and as a sign to Washington that the country is serious about vigorously prosecuting the drug war. Profit margins are so high in the drug trade that producers can lose large portions of their products and remain in the black. The British government has estimated that, at best, 20 percent of the world drug supply is seized, whereas somewhere around 80 percent of it would have to be nabbed for the business to become unprofitable. Even under the best of circumstances for law enforcement, that’s just not going to happen. Government agents might as well be looking for a bail of cocaine on a snow-covered mountain. The high value of drug imports belies their relatively small size—something around 15 tons for heroin and 400 to 500 for cocaine, which is vanishingly puny compared to overall American imports.

Prohibition helps create the very conditions that make prohibition ineffective. Attempts to disrupt the drug supply face all kinds of problems because that supply is the product of a decentralized free market. And often those who bear the brunt of the penalties are the lowest-level personnel in an operation. In Bolivia, Plan Dignidad has targeted farmers. In the United States, mandatory minimum sentences implemented in the ’80s have all but assured that only easily replaceable players have been sent to prison. Gauging the level of a person’s involvement in an enterprise based on the quantity of drugs he or she is carrying makes about as much sense as assuming that the driver of an armored car is the CEO of the bank. Lock up the driver, and the bank will find another one for the same price.
 
Lewis Rice Jr., special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York Field Division, told Congress roughly the same thing when he testified on ecstasy enforcement in June 2000. It cost a smuggling organization in the Netherlands, he said, $200 per trip to recruit somebody to be a courier of between 30,000 and 45,000 pills. When the United States caught one, the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for drug possession would apply. So the state would shell out at least $100,000 to imprison this pawn, while it cost the dealer $200 to find a new one. Extrapolate this disparity across the drug war, and we begin to see how relatively small players are able to confound the multibillion-dollar efforts of the world’s only superpower.

Such sentences are a lasting legacy of the legislative hurricane that whipped through Congress in the ’80s. The Democratic Party was beating a fast retreat, having been shredded by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Democrats were blamed for the chaos of the ’60s and the melancholy of the ’70s, for a culture of drug tolerance and, in some quarters, even for losing the Vietnam War. Eric Sterling, lead counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee in the ’80s, says that his colleagues saw drug policy as an area in which retreating Democrats could look tough. The result was predictable: The Democratic Congress declared that someone caught with 5 grams of crack would face the same mandatory prison sentence as someone busted with 500 grams of powder cocaine. It took more than 20 years to start to undo that disparity.

During the same period, the United States intensified its drug war abroad. Its casualties were also disproportionately small-time. The typical Bolivian cocalero grows a relatively tiny crop of coca. Throughout the ’50s and up through the ’80s, left-wing organizations were organizing these and other poor Bolivian peasants, often with the aid of the Soviet Union. Among them were miners who worked extracting the nation’s rich tin deposits, an activity that once accounted for 40 percent of Bolivian exports but became dramatically unprofitable as the price of the metal tumbled in the mid-’80s. In 1985, under the guidance of Senate President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, Bolivia became a testing ground for a “shock therapy” cure of its various economic ills, including a massive national debt and 24,000-percent hyperinflation. State subsidies were discontinued; industries were privatized. Inflation was indeed halted, but thousands lost their jobs in the process.

As the unemployed flooded into the Chapare in search of land to grow coca, the United States launched its Bolivian drug war, funding the military unit Unidad Móvil de Patrullaje Rural (“Mobile Rural Patrol Unit”), or UMOPAR, which was tasked with the destruction of illegal coca crops. Morales and the cocalero unions organized to defend themselves against the onslaught. At the time, both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing insurgents were involved in the Latin American drug trade. Given that the latter were protected by the CIA, that agency’s mission tended to collide with that of the DEA. [In 1982 TK--CK], the Reagan White House issued an order that the CIA was not required to disclose to the DEA when it was working with an indicted or suspected drug-smuggling operation.

But the DEA has had a tougher fight against the forces of economics. Take the agency’s one major success: The spraying of massive Mexican poppy fields with pesticides greatly reduced the flow of opium and heroin into the United States in the mid-’70s. But American demand for those drugs was then met by Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, and the Mexican growers adapted by moving to smaller, better hidden locations. Within about five years, their country was once again a major supplier. The Afghan and Southeast Asian crops were both encouraged by the CIA, which was happy to see its bands of local anti-Communist warriors with a steady stream of income. The Afghan crop initially supported the U.S.-backed mujahideen, who battled the Soviet Union. Today, it still supports an insurgency against an occupier, only this time that occupier is the United States. Once again, eradication is the favored policy.

Wiping out any crop is nearly impossible, even under the best of circumstances, and on an international scale, it’s fraught with political difficulty. The small farmer struggling to feed his family can plainly see that were it not for American demand for his harvest, he’d have no reason to be in the business. Resistance to eradication in Afghanistan is fierce, and the Taliban uses it as its strongest political tool: Uncle Sam wants to destroy your crops, it rightly warns poppy farmers. We’ll protect you and your livelihood. The cost of that protection is political allegiance and a stiff tax, which the Taliban uses to wage its insurgent effort.
 
Attempts to take out coca in South America have faced similar intransigence. The DEA managed in the early ’00s to reduce the number of acres of the plant grown in Bolivia and Peru, but the crop just shifted to Colombia—and Bolivia elected a coca grower president. When the U.S. and Colombian governments sprayed coca fields in Colombia, growers moved their operations to national forests, where spraying isn’t allowed. Still, acreage known to be under coca cultivation has declined by about a third in South America since 2000. But the decline hasn’t been accompanied by any significant disruption in production, according to the 2007 World Drug Report produced by the United Nations. This is largely due to another adaptation to U.S. policy: producers’ increasing the yield of the coca plant.

Despite the high price the United States pays politically, eradication does essentially nothing to stop the flow of drugs into America. The cost of coca or poppies is a negligible fraction of the final price of cocaine or heroin, so drug producers are willing to pay farmers relatively well to compensate for the risk of growing. It costs about $300 to buy the coca leaf needed to make a kilo of coke, which retails for more than a $100,000 in the United States. Doubling or tripling a farmer’s pay won’t have much impact on either the producer’s bottom line or the farmer’s quality of life—but it will encourage the planting of more coca.
 
The Bolivian example highlights the political hurdles the United States faces when attempting to destroy a drug crop. While we were in the Chapare, Christian and I’s first interview was with two regional mayors. Both were members of  Morales’ party, Movimiento al Socialismo (“Movement Toward Socialism”), or MAS. In response to a question about the consequences of the war on drugs, the mayor of Villa Tunari, Feliciano Mamani, lifted his pant leg, revealing a star-shaped scar on his shin. He was hit by a tear gas canister during a 2000 demonstration. “It just stopped pussing a few weeks ago,” he said in Spanish. Though the 2000 protest had been over water rights, it’s instructive that Mamani first and foremost blamed the American drug war. American power in Bolivia was seen to be behind every effort to control the countryside. That suspicion was not without merit, given that the United States had funded and trained the Bolivian military and propped up several American-educated presidents. The American government also cut monthly checks to Bolivian judges and prosecutors, payments laughably known as “anti-corruption bonuses.”

Mamani and Shinahota Mayor Rimer Agreda, both cocaleros, came up through the MAS party ranks during the ’80s and ’90s. “The war made the American government’s intentions clear to the people of Chapare,” said Mamani. “Behind the war on drugs there are other interests. Interests in natural resources, and in dismantling the [MAS] unions in the Chapare.” Agreda added, “There was a reaction of the people, and they decided to oppose this until they reached their goal.” The calculus is quite simple: Coca is what allows the people of the Chapare to survive; therefore, an attack on coca is an attack on the people.

Jaimie Rojas, a 74-year-old newspaper vendor and college student in Villa Tunari, had been in the Chapare longer than almost anyone else. He arrived as one of the early settlers in the ’50s, and he’d known Morales and the other MAS leaders since they were in their early 20s. I asked him when he noticed Morales’ leadership skills. “When UMOPAR came to Chapare and Evo spoke out against it,” he said. “He was able to unite the people and have them all turn back UMOPAR.”
 
I spoke with Evo himself at the Cochabamba airport and asked him about how the U.S. drug war contributed to his rise to power. “In the beginning, yes, but now we are much bigger,” he said in Spanish. Through a translator, he added that coca eradication and U.S. imperialism, which are one and the same thing as far as he’s concerned, are so unpopular that they allowed his union to form and his movement to grow. He stressed that his supporters now encompassed more than just coca producers, an assertion that would be proved correct several months later, when he captured almost 54 percent of the vote, beating the Washington-backed candidate in a dramatic 25-point landslide.
 
It’s one thing for MAS leaders to believe that they came to power because a majority of Bolivians oppose the U.S. war on drugs. But even those charged with fighting the war say the same thing. Christian and I visited a military base in Chimoré to take a DEA-sponsored helicopter ride and  meet with the base commander, but he was nowhere to be found. Bolivian soldiers played a lively game of soccer while we were distracted with a tour of the base’s piss-stained prison and the DEA’s coke museum. Afterwards, Christian pulled out his bag of coca leaf, which he had bought in La Paz and we’d been chewing steadily. Combined with a touch of baking soda, which almost all Bolivians carry around in a small vial, coca leaf gives a caffeine-like buzz and nums the mouth and stomach. Personal possession of the plant is legal under Bolivia law, which makes the U.S. effort to uproot it that much more difficult. It’s often chewed by UMOPAR soldiers while they’re doing their eradication.

Christian offered me some. The soldier minding us got a shocked look on his face. “¿Desde La Paz?” he asked, pointing to the bag.

“Sí.”

The soldier smiled: La Paz coca is supposed to taste better than the Chapare variety, which it was his charge to destroy.

“¿Por favor?”

Christian nodded, and the soldier stuffed a handful in his mouth, then stashed another in his canteen bag. “Quita el hambre,” he said. “It takes away the hunger.”

His mouth numbed by coca, the soldier warmed up to us. He told us wasn’t unhappy in his job. He was poorly educated, he said, so his lot could have been worse. He’s paid roughly $130 a month by the Bolivian government and a little extra by the United States. Plus, he admitted, he likes the uniform.

After a long silence, he asked us in Spanish why it was that we were allowed to come to his country and tour the military bases, but he couldn’t get a visa to visit our country. “It’s called imperialism,” Christian said in English, a statement no one translated.

While still waiting for the base commander, we were taken in to see the subcommander. Before we asked a question, he told us how committed he is to derechos humanos, “human rights.” UMOPAR has had a history of corruption and human-rights abuses, just like almost every effort that relies on the poor to staff a unit dealing with large amounts of cash, funded by a foreign government, and opposed by the local people. The operation is similar in style and substance to many others around the globe, and its transgressions have included disappearances, political assassination, seizure of land, and other methods of terrorizing of the local populace.

The subcommander is so committed to human rights, he said, that he recently took a course on them with the Ministry of Justice. To prove it, he handed us a certificate: “Major Fernando Plato has successfully completed the course Human Rights and Sexually Transmitted Diseases.”

“What does that mean?” Christian whispered to me. “They teach them to wear condoms when they’re raping detainees?”

Plato told us that the human-rights abuses associated with the anti-drug campaign of the ’80s and ’90s sparked fierce resistance among the people of the region, which MAS channeled to build its organization.

As Plato droned on, it looked less and less like we’d be getting a helicopter ride. We were brought bread and three-liter bottles of Coke and, finally, Colonel Dario Leigue. He’s sorry, but he can’t meet with us without the permission of the commander-in-chief, Admiral Luis Aranda, who was in a meeting. Seeing our skepticism, Leigue told us to call his commander ourselves. He gave a us a cell number, but the admiral didn’t answer. (A few weeks later, he was in the news denying that he was plotting a coup. I called him up again, but he didn’t answer then, either.)

At the checkpoint outside the base, a woman was selling coca. “Prohibido Orinar,” said a sign on a crumbling wall behind her. “No urinating.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 10:47 am by Ryan Grim and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.