Word: bolivia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cocaine, one of the most popular and most expensive illicit drugs sold in the U.S., derives from the coca plant which grows mainly in Peru and Bolivia. For centuries, highland Indians have chewed leaves of the coca plant as a mild stimulant, to stave off hunger and drowsiness. Although this use continues, Bolivia now produces four times more coca leaf than can be consumed locally...
Continued U.S. non-recognition would be highly ironic. Just as the late Shah of Iran and Somoza of Nicaragua were U.S.-created dictators, so is the Bolivian military largely a product of U.S. foreign policy in the 50s and 60s. The 1952 revolution in Bolivia shook the U.S. government because major mines were nationalized, a peoples' militia were created, and workers obtained an important role in the new government. Over the next 18 years U.S. economic aid was contingent on the rebuilding of the military, and direct military aid during that period came to $56.6 million. Even more important, between...
Since 1964, when the military came to power in Bolivia, there have been massive denials of human rights, extensive political repression, including frequent massacres of peasants and miners. U.S. economic military and economic aid continued undaunted during all of that time, and only recently has there been any serious objection to the interruptions in the democratic process...
...cocaine trade in Bolivia has boomed since the military coup of July 1980. CBS' 60 Minutes recently provided ample documentation that top-ranking members of the military are closely associated with the elite group which controls the drug traffic. Minister of Interior Colonel Luis Arce Gomez, for example, is part owner of an air freight company which makes weekly flights to an unknown location in Colombia. In February, his plane was found to be carrying 300 kilos of cocaine, but Arce avoided conviction. Arce's yearly income from cocaine was estimated at half a million...
...clamp down on the cocaine traders. The statement may have lacked conviction, but the military leaders were not willing to risk their 800 million per year business to find out. The subsequent coup brought to power a cocaine mafia that includes even the president Luis Garcia Meza. Informants within Bolivia report that cocaine production now has become centralized, efficient and much more tightly controlled. The losers are Indian peasants, who no longer can afford to chew coca because its price has risen astronomically. With the Bolivian mafia so pervasive and well-connected, any thought of internal drug enforcement would...