Bolivia contemplates legalisation of coca

The Bolivian government is considering a plan to resume cultivation of the raw ingredient in cocaine in a remote jungle basin, allowing farmers to cultivate small plots of the crop in a move aimed at averting nationwide strikes and unrest.

“We’ve begun serious dialogues with coca growers with the aim of combating drug trafficking and maintaining social tranquility,” Vice Minister of Social Defence Ernesto Justiniano has told The Associated Press. “And one of the alternatives is to allow the possibility of half a cato (0.20 acre) to every coca farmer.”

The government will conduct a six-month study to determine the size of the nation’s legal market for coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, Mr Justiniano said.

Set at 29,652 acres, the coca crop from legal cultivation supplies millions of people who chew the leaves, which act as a stimulant and can stave off hunger.

If the legal market increased, some 15,000 coca farmers in the Chapare – a jungle basin that supplied half of all cocaine in the world five years ago - would be allowed to cultivate coca on plots up to 8,610sq ft, he said.

Justiniano said the programme would hurt drug traffickers by giving the government more control over what is now a clandestine industry in the jungle lowlands.

But US officials say expanding the legal market for coca in Bolivia would lead to another 7,000 hectares of coca that would feed the international cocaine supplies.

US officials have threatened cuts in US aid and say legalisation would jeopardise the country’s free trade agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

“Our policy is very clear and it remains clear,” said an official at the US embassy in Bogota. “Any proposal that would legitimise or legalise any coca in the Chapare would be a violation of Bolivian law and a violation of international treaties to which Bolivia is a signatory.”

US-trained Bolivian soldiers trying to eradicate coca crops often engage in gunfights with farmers in the Chapare.

But coca growers have become a potent political force under the leadership of Socialist Evo Morales, who lost last year’s presidential election by two percentage points.

In the wake of riots that left 30 dead and the government nearly collapsed two weeks ago, coca growers threatened again to shut down the country largest highway. President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada’s proposal for an income tax hike sparked the riots, and he has since withdrawn the proposal.

“Bolivia has suddenly been confronted by a unified burst of anger from movements on all sides,” said Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Centre, a human rights group based in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city. ”This is bargaining time. The president is weak and ready to give away the store. Opposition groups are making sure they’ve got their order in.”

Human rights groups also say the US war on drugs has killed peasants and farmers and ruined the country’s commerce by turning the nation’s most important highway into a 200-mile battlefront.

“America’s single-minded focus on drug eradication in Bolivia has undermined the fragile democracy officials in Bolivia have,” said Laurie Freeman, an associate for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, another human rights group.

US officials also fear relaxing the drug policy will bolster Mr Morales’s stature.

“One of the things that destabilised Bolivia in the past was a rampant, unfettered drug trade,” the US official said. “It would be a shame to turn around and go backwards.”