A Popular but Illicit Crop Unites the Andean Nations

For the first time since Simon Bolivar united half a continent in 1822, the Andean countries have come together in a wildly productive multinational business.

Shortly after the death of “the Liberator” in 1830, the countries he brought together in the Grand Colombia--Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia--forever split apart, taking with them his dream for a strong united Latin front.

Not even the Andean Pact--the most important existing economic treaty among Latin countries--has driven the continent toward Bolivar’s dream. Nor has their common crisis of a crushing external debt pushed them to a common stand against their creditors.

However, an underground, international Andean monopoly has been formed with earnings that would put it near the top of any list of the world’s richest companies. Its owners are widely considered among the world’s fabulously wealthy. They have organized themselves in autonomous groups throughout Latin America in such a way as to eliminate competition among each other for the good of their business.

That business “depends entirely on local, renewable resources that cause no adverse environmental effects,” notes Tova Maria Solo, an urban planner in Colombia. “But unlike traditional agricultural products that are exported as raw materials . . . all the products of this industry are manufactured in the countries.”

These entrepreneurs have created an international market in record time. Their principal buyer is the United States, but they have already cornered most of Europe and are now opening markets in Australia and Canada. Demand for their product grows daily, and they have yet to place a single advertisement.

Colombia, Bolivia and Peru are the center of this economic emporium, while Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay have begun branch operations. Panama serves as the banking center for many of the necessary and convoluted financial transactions. In each country, the industry generates employment in countless sectors: agriculture, real estate, manufacturing, research and development, transportation, communications and defense. Given the unemployment and poverty in the host countries, industry leaders have no problem attracting job candidates.

They own vast farms for the cultivating their raw material, laboratories for processing, fleets of planes, ships and trucks to carry their goods, sophisticated communication equipment to organize and control operations, plus the most powerful and modern weapons to ensure security.

Weapons for a multinational industry? In this business, armed forces are the most effective instrument of market domination. They serve to eliminate unwanted competition and any opposition to industry expansion. Those who are disloyal, late in paying bills or unwilling to participate in the business are simply killed. Fear is the company trademark. No one dares regulate this industry, nor investigate the owners.

The product, of course, is cocaine.

According to U.S. government estimates, in Bolivia alone more than 300,000 peasants cultivated coca worth $2.5 billion to the country in 1986. Next door, 50,000 Colombians are occupied with the processing and trafficking of cocaine. Their work generates exports of $3 billion each year, almost twice the value of the country’s coffee crop.

But all the statistics are questionable. In a clandestine, multibillion dollar business, reliable profit and revenue studies are impossible. In some countries, Peru among them, no one even bothers with estimates.

Narcotics trafficking--one of the world’s largest enterprises--exerts a growing and immeasurable economic impact on an entire continent. Yet, the United States continues to treat it as a criminal rather than an economic problem.

If ever there was a classic example of the failure of such an approach, it is Bolivia. In Colombia and Mexico, the United States provided funding for halfhearted efforts to combat narcotics. But Bolivia, the stereotypical banana republic, was chosen by the Reagan Administration in 1986 as the site of a unique anti-drug operation. For the first time, the approach would be direct: Destroy the evil at its source with U.S. troops.

Less than six months later, 174 U.S. soldiers, 11 Black Hawk helicopters, a base in the state of El Beni and a precise strategy finished in a shameful failure. In the end, the troops left in disarray, stung by accusations that they had conducted their work inefficiently, undermined the small country’s government and even consorted with the traffickers they had been told to destroy.

The accusations were leveled by Bolivian politicians, officials, press and a bitter population that from the start had seen the U.S. program as little more than an unwelcome invasion. American efforts in Bolivia ran aground against official corruption combined with the widespread involvement of the population in the cultivation of coca.

As early as 1832, the production of 9 million kilos of coca leaves represented an important element of the Bolivian economy. It was exported primarily to Europe to be processed as drugs and a wine called Mariani, made famous by such figures as Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola.

Some 70,000 Bolivians, meanwhile, chewed coca leaves regularly. Legend had it that Manco Capac--the divine son of the sun--taught the Indians the use of the magic plant to “relieve hunger, to give strength to the weak and to forget adversity.” Today, coca continues to be an integral part of Bolivian culture and economy.

The United States, along with some European countries, recently signed a new three-year eradication agreement with the Bolivian government; the plan will provide $58 million to pay coca farmers to change their crop. For each five acres of coca, a peasant can earn $8,000; the new plan will pay them less than 5% of that amount, $350, to substitute another crop on the same land.

Members of the labor union of coca farmers--Syndicato de Cultivadores de Coca--in the regions of Chapare, Chimore and El Beni cannot understand why they must be deprived of their livelihoods to stop the use of cocaine in the United States.

If it’s true that Bolivian peasants have suffered the rigor of military governments for many years, it’s also true that if they can choose between democracy without coca and military regimes that tolerate coca, they will choose the latter.

Only in Bolivia could the narcotics mafia participate directly and openly in the government. Drug traffickers financed Gen. Luis Garcia Meza’s 1980 coup, opening the door for an active role in his subsequent government. Garcia Meza’s interior minister, responsible for the government’s “war” on narcotics, was widely known as the “minister of coca.”

Coca is considered the only alternative to misery. “Drug trafficking is the economy in Bolivia,” a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent said in frustration and disgust after a tour of duty in La Paz. “For this poor population, any money is good money” agreed the Rev. Gregorio Carrasco, a priest from El Beni.

That holds true for the country’s cash-hungry government as well. The administration of President Victor Paz Estenssoro surprised its Western allies in March by announcing that it intended to use the anti-coca funds to help pay off the nation’s foreign debt. Paz promised to invest an equivalent amount in Bolivian pesos into the crop-substitution program.

The plan will fail. The money offered is obviously not enough to buy off the Bolivian coca farmers. The powerful drug industry, with incredible earnings amid such precarious economies as those of Bolivia, Peru and Columbia, becomes practically indestructible.