UNREPORTED WORLD
Bolivia: Coca or Death

25 mins

10:00:03 Bolivia is sliding into anarchy

Welcome to La Paz. A city whose very name means the peace, but as you can see on the streets today it’s not particularly peaceful.
10:00:14 Once most of Bolivia’s farmers grew coca. Not anymore.
Coca can be turned into cocaine, and so the United States has pressured Bolivia into destroying almost the entire crop.
This is the story of who’s really paying the price for America’s war against drugs.

Titles: Coca or Death

Demonstration, La Paz

10:00:43 For weeks, this has been everyday life in La Paz. Farmers jamming the city streets, police on alert – everyone on edge.

Women don’t usually join demonstrations here, but this is a fight for everyone.

I set off along the back streets to find the nerve centre of the daily protests, the Confederation of Bolivian Farmers. There were rumours the farmers, the campesinos, planned to block every road into the city.

We’re going to have to make our way painstakingly up here, and I say painstakingly because in La Paz we’re four km above sea level, and every step makes you feel like an old woman or an old man.

10:01:24 That’s one reason they grew coca in the first place: chewing it helps altitude sickness.

These farmers know exactly why the Americans want to eradicate coca, but they say the way it’s being done is ruining their country.

La situation es mucho peor despues la eradication de coca?

Si, no hay dinero.

Since they’ve started the coca eradication schemes, life has got much much worse because there’s absolutely no money circulating.

They were chewing coca leaves - for them it’s like having a cup of tea. If other people want to turn it into cocaine, I was told, that’s their business.

it’s very important that we know, that for the campesinos, the coca leaf is not something they get high on, it’s not something they snort up their noses. It’s used as a medical infusion, it’s used to mask pain and used almost as a vitamin source. The problem with drugs is not with really Bolivia, it’s in San Francisco, it’s in Los Angeles, it’s in the US. It’s not Bolivia’s problem.

10:02:31 Or, rather, it is. The farmers know global demand transformed the Bolivian economy. And they don’t want it reversed.

10:02:41 Freddy Mamani, deputy leader of the union arrived with important news. Farmers had blocked a key road into the city and the government was warning if they weren’t gone by 3 o’clock, the army would attack. He said he’d take us there.

What will happen today if there’s a violent confrontation between the army and the people?

We’re going to lose because we don’t have anything.

10:03:19 We were the only civilian vehicle on what’s normally one of Bolivia’s busiest roads.

10:03:23 Farmers have been blocking the roads with boulders for months. The first barricade came into view.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get around the side, but I’d say we’ll manage.

10:03:36 The farmers are out to paralyse the economy until the government reverses the eradication plan.

The soldiers who clear the roads are conscripts. It’s hard to know where their sympathies really lie.

He said that he is removing the rocks that his parents and his family members and friends put on the road during the night. He says if this blockade continues he’s afraid the time will come when he has to shoot. He doesn’t want to, but he would have to.

10:04:16 We pressed on in search of the farmers’ leader. Suddenly we were at an army road block. All farmers travelling in the same direction as us were being stopped.

We have been brought to a halt we seem to have a whole line of soldiers blocking the road up ahead.

The villagers here want us the international press to speak to the soldiers to ask them to clear the road. So, let’s go and see what they ssay to that.

10:04:56 Behind me, a defiant farmer let off a stick of dynamite.

10:05:05 Can we not pass? He’s saying that yes we can pass.

10:05:14 I don’t know if it is valid to say that now we have spoken to them they have decided to veer off the road because they don’t like bad publicity but for whatever reason they have cleared the road but they still look pretty menacing with those guns.

10:05:37 We drove on. Ahead more boulders.

Actuality: It’s a bumpy ride, very very bumpy.

10:05:46 We entered what’s effectively a no go area for the army

10:05:50 Some farmers were preparing to stone our vehicle, but backed off when they saw Freddy.

PTC-Police HQ: ‘Just metres away from a burnt out car is what remains of what used to be the police headquarters. Ransacked, abandoned, there are no police in Achacachi any more.’

10:06:09 Achacachi is home to the farmer’s leader, Felipe Quispe. It turned out he’d moved on, fearing assassination. But thousands of armed farmers had gathered nonetheless, defying the army’s ultimatum.

PTC-‘They’re armed they are showing us guns, old, ancient weapons, but still they’re prepared to use them they say. They say to the army, come and get us, we’re waiting for you’.

10:06:39 The farmers see this as more than an economic issue.

UPSOUND

10:06:44 They see it as an example of age-old ethnic discrimination. Kill off coca to help the white man, to hell with the Indians.

Woman shouting-she doesn’t want this Bolivia, she wants to leave right now. She’s calling for change immediately.

10:07:06 The government deadline passed and the Army didn’t attack. For the farmers a victory of sorts in what is becoming close to civil war.

Crowd cheers

10:07:33 With the roads to La Paz blocked, we headed for Los Yungas, a coca growing region deep in the Andes. It was next on the army hit-list for eradication.

PTC: This is the road we’re taking to Yungas, the cocaleros use it to transport their produce to La Paz. They call it the Camino de la Muerte, or the road of death, it’s officially the most dangerous road in the world.

10:08:00 Earlier this year farmers had blocked the road and stopped troops advancing into the coca area. The soldiers disobeyed orders to open fire. No one expected that to happen a second time.

Checkpoint

 

10:08:21 We were stopped at a checkpoint, set up to prevent the movement of chemicals used to make cocaine from coca.

Sync

-Every day he encounters chemicals trying to go through this road. There has been a great reduction in the eradication of coca since the eradication plan, but they still exist.

 

10:09:00 Soon we were surrounded by coca.

It’s the only thing the global economy wants from Bolivia.

The US is giving aid to to help Bolivia to rebuild its economy but its no where near the 600 million dollars a year the drug trade used to bring in.

10:09:18 Pedro Ramirez, a coca farmer, had invited us to come and see how he lived. He and his wife and two children spend eight hours a day in their coca field. It hasn’t made them rich.

10:09:39 Sync-room

This is my house he says, this is my room where I sleep. Is that your bed, I sleep there with my son and my wife sleeps there with my daughter.

10:10:08 He took me to see his plantation. Even in the heyday of coca production these farmers didn’t earn much. Most of the profit was further up the drug chain. But the substitute crops make even less.

Sync- This plant can’t be changed for any other. Because of the ground, he says. It’s Americans who taught us how to make cocaine. We campesinos we don’t know cocaine we don’t know anything of it.

We produce coca, and nothing else. It’s the symbol of the Inca nation, and this culture is ours, he says.

10:11:04 Back in La Paz it was the biggest feast day of the year. The city had been brought to a standstill this time by a military parade.

10:11:18 While we were away 8 farmers had been shot by the Army. In the last year 40 farmers have died in this way. Hundreds have been injured.

10:11:30 But in a way the government has a gun to its own head. If you want more aid, says America, stop growing coca. They call it the Dignity Plan.

10:11:41 The Interior Minister was at the parade. I decided to ask him if he’d authorised the shooting of unarmed civilians.

Sync interview with Minister

‘We didn’t give orders to shoot with bullets that would kill with proper bullets, he said. But we have to open the roads we have to lift these blockades. It would be like in your country you couldn’t have the situation of road blockades in your country so why should we in Bolivia’

10:12:24 But the farmers had a different version of events. They told us they were shot down with live ammunition. They shot us like animals, they said.

10:12:45 The new Bolivian head of the Dignity Plan was being sworn in. It was an awkward occasion. His predecessor had been sacked for smuggling arms to Argentina. The ceremony was full of anti-narcotics officials congratulating themselves on the success of the Dignity Plan. I managed to talk to Stanley Schrager, the linkman between the US Embassy and the Bolivian Military.

10:13:08
Sync-Stanley

“Bolivia has the probably the best record in the world of reducing coke over the last 5 years. And it is due in a large part to the work of the Bolivian Government and the people you here today and also I think with the support of the United States.”

10:13:22 Yes but it has caused a lot of unrest in the country people say they are feeling real economic hardship a result of the loss of drug revenues and that it affects everyone from the cocaleros to all campesinos and even to the middle classes.

10:13:35 I think it has had an effect. It has had a negative effective because the narcotics trade in this country was such a large part of the economy for so long. But I think we have shown that we have other alternatives. And our agency for International Development has an extensive alternative development project, where we work with campesinos and former cocaleros to grow other crops to make up for what they’ve lost. It’s a difficult process.

10:14:03 You can say that again. A few miles from La Paz is a place which perfectly illustrates the problem of substitute crops.

PTC We’re at the Villa Fatima market, the biggest coca market in the whole of Bolivia. Here coca is taken from Yungas and Chapare to be weighed bagged and redistributed to other points in the country. This coca is for internal consumption. It is a huge market as I was walking up the street here I wasn’t sure if I was on the right road and suddenly I could smell the over powering stench of coca, stench it is a nice smell actually, it is kind of like hay.

10:14:43 Coca is a plant perfectly suited to the Bolivian climate. It can be harvested four times a year and even for local, legal use, it fetches a good price. By contrast substitute crops are more difficult to grow and fetch rock bottom prices.

SYNC- so now this price of bag of coca is 900 Bolivianas which I think is about $150 more or less.

10:15:10 Outside I found a woman selling oranges and lemons. She told me the same weight of oranges fetched about six Bolivianos, or one dollar.

She is saying yes there is always money in coca but these nothing.

10:15:36 It was dawn and we were now with the army, setting out on an eradication mission.

10:15:50 Once Bolivia was the third-biggest producer of coca in the world. Now ninety per cent has been wiped out.

10:15:58 These are the soldiers, funded by US military aid, who work every day to tear coca out of the fields. They’ve already swept through this area already once this year.

Gunshot

10:16:08 One officer told me that eradication was moving ahead at 80 miles an hour, while the alternatives were crawling along at twenty.

PTC: We have just come across our first coca plant.

10:16:29 One additional reason Bolivian farmers are so resentful is the Dignity Plan has done nothing to reduce cocaine use worldwide. Their business has simply moved to Colombia.
10:16:41 As our squad dug up the fresh plants, we came upon the evidence that the illegal trade was still operating in Bolivia as well.

SYNC- 10:16:54 This is a look out point until very recently someone was watching the whole
area to see if any police were coming.

PTC: It has been a really really hard trek it is a bit too India Jones for my liking but apparently what we are looking for is right down here.

And this is it we found our cocaine factory.

10:17:45 The owners of this operation had slipped away just before we arrived. But this was primitive technology, eminently transportable.

SYNC- One or two people run up and down, up and down this, it’s like a treadmill in a gym, and this is to crush these leaves into a paste.

10:18:11 In one sense this capture can only be good news. But ordinary Bolivians don’t see the world view. They see the immediate effect.

PTC: The people who own this laboratory had we not rumbled them, they would have earned £1200 for this days work.

10:18:35 But it’s more than the factory that goes up in flames. This is money lost that would have been spent in local shops, local hospitals, local schools.

10:18:54 We returned to La Paz.

SYNC- old woman screaming

PTC:This is a government building and this woman is shouting at the authority here she says she has had enough, enough, an end to drugs an end to corruption she says there is no justice in this country

10:19:16

La Paz should be the place where government support is strongest. But it’s crumbling here too.

PTC: This is the street in La Paz where casual workers come here in hope of finding a days work. Ever since the economic crisis set in after coco eradication more and more people come here every day. They advertise their trade on these bags for instance here carpenter this man is a plumber, somebody here is a plasterer and a painter and another plumber. But these men have already been waiting here for hours so it is unlikely that today anybody is going to come along and offer them a job.

10:19:57

Many are dominated by a sense of shame – they’ve had to abandon their professions and take up anything that helps make ends meet.

Interview with teacher: It is not my profession she says to sell bread in the street. She is a teacher, a secondary school teacher.

 

10:20:26

While talking to people in the market I got a message that farmer’s leader, Felipe Quispe, had come out of hiding.

SYNC

10:20:34

The government, it seemed, wanted to negotiate with him.

SYNC:

10:20:41 PTC: I think finally we are going to meet the man who is holding the Bolivian government to ransom this is Guispe the man who has declared the Republic of Acucachi within the Republic of Bolivia I think we have finally got him.

It’s Guispe there wearing the cap with coca leaves in front of him.

This is the man whose direct aim to lay siege to La Paz. We are waiting to this meeting is over and then we hope to interview him.

10:21:16 He was holding a meeting to decide what line to take.

SYNC

10:21:19 Back in the Eighties Quispe spent six years in prison for belonging to a Marxist guerilla group that made explosives. He was fighting then to promote the rights of indigenous Bolivians over whites.

Actuality

Quispe is using the present dispute to extend that war.

SYNC: you have once said that the whites should be thrown out of Bolivia, Porque? Quispe: This isn’t their land they have come and taken our natural resources and riches. And they’re trying to destroy our coca, our religion, our culture. Sandra: It is very racist?

10:22:15 It’s not racist, he said. But it’s hard to underestimate how dangerous the situation in Bolivia has become.

Actuality

10:22:45 The poorest country in South America, is falling apart as it does its bit to address a social problem of the western world.

PTC: I’ve tried to ask him if he could win this conflict, how he could win this conflict without arms?

But no he says, “I have no time, I have no time and he has run off in the taxi that’s it.

10:22:54 Every day the protests build.

10:23:02 Thirty years ago Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia for trying to start a revolution. Now it looks as if the Americans are succeeding where Che Guevara failed.

PTC: They are shooting here I think they are shooting tear gas.

10:23:18 The protestors favourite chant is coca or death.

10:23:28 It will come to that for some Bolivians, in this unequal battle between the rich and poor.