Coca: An Andean Tradition IV 0
CONFUSION BETWEEN COCA AND DRUGS
Firstly, it is necessary to stress and distinguish the fundamental difference between chewing coca in the Andean setting and the unlawful use of cocaine in the West. In a speech made in 1992 before the annual Assembly of the World Health Organization, the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Mr. Paz Zamora referred to these confused and contradictory interpretations and observed that “coca is an Andean tradition while cocaine is a Western habit” (Tribune de Geneve, 7 May 1992). Undoubtedly the consumer countries deliberately assimilate the leaf with its profound significance and the reviled drug, condemned by indigenous peoples but avidly consumed by westerners in the form of cocaine, whose perverse effects are destroying the health of present and future generations in the consumer societies. In the view of the adversaries of coca, trapped by their own logic of supply and demand, coercion is sufficient to control drug addiction: i.e. eradicating the plant to the detriment of the survival of an ancestral Andean tradition. Secondly, by virtue of its properties in medicine, health and work, the traditional form of coca leaf consumption is neither harmful nor injurious to the organism, unlike caffeine, tannin and nicotine which have spread and achieved universal recognition. In contrast with growing alcohol and tobacco consumption, the traditional use of coca in its manifold forms is not and never has been a form of drug addiction, but a natural indigenous custom which it is possible to give up without producing any narcotic syndrome. No one can claim, in the absence of scientific proof to the contrary, that the Quechua and Aymara Indians, particularly in Peru nd Bolivia, who have been chewing the sacred leaf of their ancestors since time immemorial, have become drug addicts. Consequently, the indigenous coca producing populations have every reason to be indignant about the lack of logic in the contradictory arguments of the Western countries, which maintain that the perverse effects of the drug in their rich societies can be controlled without eradicating the economic, social and moral factors that have engendered one of the West’s greatest scourges. The adversaries of Andean culture, who condemn the coca plant, with a glass of whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other, clamour for its eradication and treat its producers as pariahs should give a plain answer to the following questions: If alcoholism is one of the greatest scourges in Europe and responsible for the slow extermination of the indigenous populations in America, why is the cultivation of the vine not eradicated, even though the vine incarnates one of the elements of the old world’s identity? Since the tobacco habit is responsible for a huge number of victims in consumer societies, why is it impossible to prohibit the growing of tobacco? Obviously, no answers will be forthcoming. However, there is one irrefutable observation that needs to be emphasized: was it not the gringo, the white man, for whom gold, plants and even cultural artifacts embody mercantile and monetary value who disembarked on Indian land and transformed the coca leaf, which contains 1 per cent of cocaine among its 14 alkaloids, into an illicit commodity? The chemical processing of the leaves of the plant, with their extremely varied therapeutic properties, into a hard paste and the preparation and consumption of cocaine in the West is part of the logic of the renowned market economy, and like any commodity, is determined by capitalism’s economic laws of supply and demand. In the light of economic reality, we have every right to assert that the causes of this contemporary scourge are not to be found in the Andean countries nor are they the fault of the Indians, who are usually blamed. The true causes must be sought in the huge drug markets, in the insatiable economic and financial interests run by international and multinational mafias, among those reaches of society nagged by anxiety, by the constant fear of losing the rat race and by despair. Finally, questions must be raised about the attitude and complicity of the dependent countries’ ruling classes whose leaders only yesterday hypocritically viewed coca as a means of depraving the Indians and then shamelessly accepted the leftovers from the huge earnings of the unlawful traffic generated by the West. The paradox is that the United States of America, which declared war on coca plantations, condoned the coup d’etat carried out in the 1980s in Bolivia by the military-drug traffickers, and nowadays in the name of democracy stands surely for the policy of corrupt Governments and bestows its generosity on regimes run by veritable mafias. In this context, the cocaine consuming countries have been caught up in the web of their own economic liberalism and are the victims of their own way of life, morals and license by which everything is permitted, except the preservation of human dignity. As a result they have no answer to the question of how to eradicate from a sick social body those once accepted pernicious habits, and they are even less able to find a remedy to restore the social and moral balance of those excluded from the consumer societies. Meanwhile, the indigenous populations have for centuries been suffering from the curse of their own wealth: in the past they suffered from the curse of gold and silver and nowadays they are the victims twice or even thrice over of their coca plant, international crime, the pillaging of their coca plantations, the military occupation of their territories and the violation of their national sovereignty, as well as suffering repression and affront to thei dignity. For this reason, the indigenous peoples unhesitatingly condemn criminal acts that violate the peoples’ physical and moral integrity.
