Word: cocas
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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...
Above all, Siles, who in 1982 inherited a presidency that had changed hands 13 times in twelve years, is well aware that challenging his people's livelihood could bring about his political demise. Warns an aide to Roberto Suarez Gomez, one of the country's most flamboyant coca suppliers (see box): "U.S. pressures could lead to another revolution and a takeover by another repressive military government or, worse, by the leftists...
...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...
...second part of the U.S. drive involved the eradication of coca crops, accompanied by a reimbursement of about $120 for each affected acre. For 19 months, brigades of laborers tore out coca plants by hand and sprayed them with herbicide. By last November they had wiped out around one-fifth of the approximately 45,000 acres under cultivation in the upper Huallaga Valley. But after the bloody murder of 19 crop-eradication workers, believed to have been ordered by a local drug czar, the program was suspended for a couple of months...
...coca plant is part of the cultural fabric of the northern Andes. Inca nobility chewed the plant, as suggested by the discovery of pre-Columbian statues with bulging cheeks--presumably crammed with coca leaves. The same practice was observed by the explorer Amerigo Vespucci in what is now northern Venezuela during his first voyage around the world...