Bolivian Candidate Would Legalize Coca Growing

Evo Morales, the front-runner in next week’s presidential election, has told The Washington Times that he plans to legalize small coca plantations and dismantle U.S. anti-drug operations in Bolivia if he becomes president.

Mr. Morales — the son of an Indian servant who was born in a grass hut, never finished high school and gained national prominence by organizing militant unions of landless coca farmers — is challenging one of the most sensitive and critical areas of U.S. policy in Latin America.

During an interview in Bolivia’s coca-growing region, Mr. Morales, said he is prepared to risk international sanctions against South America’s poorest nation in order to achieve his movement’s key objectives.

“We are going to derogate the coca zero law,” he said of a measure pushed through Bolivia’s parliament 20 years ago strictly limiting coca production and authorizing cooperation with U.S. eradication efforts.

“We are prepared to negotiate with the gringos, but won’t accept impositions,” he said. “If they want to take away their aid, let them. It’s useless anyway and serves mainly to repress the people.”

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The latest opinion polls show Mr. Morales likely to win nearly 40 percent of the vote with his main opponent, Jorge Quiroga of the conservative Podemos party, not far behind. Podemos has launched a negative television ad campaign highlighting MAS ties with narcotrafficking, terrorism, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

Omar Barrientos, a Cochabamba lawyer who worked as a consultant to the U.S. State Department in drafting anti-drug policy, said Mr. Morales had fashioned a coalition of various far-left groups “for the common purpose of resisting the highly unpopular coca zero law.”

“Evo formed MAS by forging an alliance between coca-growing syndicates, remnants of Che Guevara-inspired guerrilla groups, radical indigenous organizations, Trotskyite-led miners’ unions as well as elements of the traditional left,” Mr. Barrientos said.

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A Native Speaker

Jimmy Langman, Newsweek, December 11, 2005

On the ballot, he is listed as Sixto Jumpiri, one more candidate in the Bolivian national elections later this month. But to the Aymara and Quechua Indians of the Bolivian highlands, he is better known as Apu Mallku, or Supreme Leader. Not long ago, that millennial honorific might have sounded quaint. Today, traditional leaders like Jumpiri command a new brand of respect — and clout. The Apu Mallku’s mandate is to oversee the vast network of ayllus, an ancient Andean system of governing councils that predates even the Inca empire. In the impoverished and neglected Bolivian countryside, the ayllus have made a comeback, their principles of communal cooperation and self-governance filling a void left by a fumbling state.

But Jumpiri, who dons a white-feathered cowboy hat and a traditional rainbow-colored poncho when he visits his constituents, wants more than respect in the highlands. He is demanding a stake in national power. That’s why he is running for Congress on the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS in Spanish) ticket, a broad coalition of leftist unions and indigenous groups led by Evo Morales, a charismatic congressman and coca-farming leader who may be on the verge of becoming Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president. “This country has always been run by the white European minority,” Jumpiri says. “With Evo, we have a chance to make a change.”

The change is already underway. Across Latin America, indigenous movements are surging in tandem with the more widespread rejection of neoliberal economic policies. Already among the region’s poorest citizens, plagued by continuing discrimination and attacks on their land rights, indigenous communities have led the region in the backlash against globalization. This is not just a cultural revival but a vibrant, sometimes explosive, outpouring of civic and political activism that is wielding greater influence over the region’s affairs, challenging centuries-old political arrangements, and helping to reshape the way Latin Americans see themselves. Since 2000, indigenous uprisings have been instrumental in toppling four presidents in Ecuador and Bolivia, two of them in the past year alone. A quieter upheaval is taking hold in places like Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala, where burnished faces are gaining visibility in federal and local governments that were once as white as the Andean slopes.

Until now, the most celebrated symbol of Latin American indigenous assertion has been Sub-Commandante Marcos, the shadowy, balaclava-clad Zapatista guerrilla who sparked a revolt in rural Mexico in 1994. But no one represents the new activism better than Morales, an Aymara Indian and longtime farmer of coca, the waxy-leafed plant from which cocaine is made. Morales parlayed his cachet as a “cocalero” leader into national headlines in 2002, narrowly losing the Bolivian presidency. He’s since broadened his agenda to include changing Bolivia’s neoliberal economic model and boosting indigenous participation in politics.

If Morales wins the Dec. 18 election (he holds a slim lead, favored by a third of the electorate), he will become the first full-blooded Indian president of a Latin American nation since Mexico’s Benito Juarez, who served two four-year terms in the mid-1800s. Already the stocky, jet-haired man whom Bolivians know as “Evo” is becoming an international icon. “Morales will inspire indigenous people everywhere,” says Alvaro Bello, a social anthropologist and — indigenous expert with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. If elected, says Bello, “he will have broken 500 years of indigenous exclusion.”

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It’s little wonder so many native Latin Americans have their eyes on Bolivia, where 36 distinct native American groups make up 70 percent of the national population — the largest indigenous majority in the hemisphere. It was only in 1952 that Indians won the right to vote and to go to school. Even today, racism persists in the highest tiers of society, business and politics. “Bolivia almost has an apartheid system. Not legal, but in practice it’s about the same,” says Alvaro Garcia, a sociologist and Morales’s running mate on the MAS slate.

In 1995, a determined group of Quechua and Aymara coca growers set out to change the rules. Under Morales’s leadership they founded MAS, and seven years later saw the charismatic cocalero come within 42,000 votes of winning the presidency. He got a serendipitous lift from former U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha, who caused national outrage when he declared that Washington might cut off Bolivian aid if Morales won. And the loser proved he had extraordinary coattails. About 30 percent of Bolivia’s 154 seats in Congress went to indigenous candidates in 2002. Polls show that the proportion could rise to at least 40 percent in this year’s balloting.

But Morales aims to shake up much more than Congress. His ardent defense of Bolivian coca farmers — whose illegal harvests join Colombia’s and Peru’s in providing the raw material for the cocaine trade — and his cordial relations with the Yankee-bashing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have already rattled Washington. Morales is unapologetic on both counts. He scoffs at suggestions he is being bankrolled by Chavez as “ridiculous.” And while most Bolivians denounce the drug trade, coca is the “sacred leaf” to the indigenous population, used in their religious ceremonies since 3000 B.C. Many of them see Morales’s steely defense of the crop as a courageous stand for national sovereignty.

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