Word: bolivia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Moreover, as coca production booms, refineries and transshipment centers have been sprouting up throughout the hemisphere. Traditionally, Peru and Bolivia have grown 90% of the world's coca and converted the leaves locally into raw coca paste (see box). Colombians have taken care of 80% of the rest of the business, refining the paste into pure cocaine, then smuggling it into the U.S. As some of the Colombian drug dons have been forced out of their homeland, however, and as coca plants have begun to shoot up in Ecuador and Brazil, refineries have been springing up in Panama, Venezuela, Argentina...
...Fulbright scholarship in Bogota. "They buy them." Soon the drug pipeline was operating as smoothly and as punctually as a regularly scheduled airline. Almost every day, soon after dawn, Colombians in sleek twin-engine Cessnas descend upon remote airstrips carved out of the hinterlands of Peru and Bolivia. In a matter of minutes the traffickers load up the planes with a few hundred kilos of raw paste. This is whisked off to processing plants like Tranquilandia to be turned into cocaine and eventually smuggled into...
While Colombian and Panamanian authorities have made some headway in the fight against drugs, their counterparts in Bolivia and Peru face problems that seem almost insuperable, as underlined by last week's State Department report. For centuries, Andean natives have chewed coca leaves as freely and frequently as Americans drink coffee. Indeed, most Bolivians, including President Hernan Siles Zuazo, routinely offer visitors coca tea. This is all quite legal because there is no law in Bolivia that prohibits either the cultivation or the marketing of coca. From the law-abiding family that earns $200 for a year's harvest...
...danger is real. In 1980 General Luis Garcia Meza seized control of Bolivia in what came to be called the Cocaine Coup. One of his first acts was to release drug mafiosos from jail. He proceeded to have the police records of cocaine traffickers destroyed and to punish those who disagreed with his policy. His army meanwhile pocketed millions of dollars in bribes and payoffs from drug dealers. In despair, local U.S. drug enforcers closed their office. As soon as Siles brought back democracy in 1982, however, the fight against drugs resumed. The DEA reopened its office and President Reagan...
...antinarcotics campaign in Bolivia has indeed proved fitful. Last August Siles ordered 1,200 troops to destroy coca crops in the Chapare region, the broad tropical valley where nearly a third of Bolivia's coca is grown. As it turned out, only six ill-equipped 100-man companies took to the field. Some of them gave local growers warning of their imminent raid six days in advance. One general actually resigned, saying that he was not about to kill campesinos just to please North Americans. The 150 men of the U.S.-funded Bolivian antidrug unit known as the Leopards have...