Bolivia | Drug War 101

Why is less cocaine coming from Colombia?

COLOMBIAN police poking around a shipment of bricks bound for Honduras last month discovered half a tonne of cocaine hidden within the cargo. Such discoveries were once commonplace: in 2000 Colombia grew 74% of the world’s coca leaves, the raw ingredient for cocaine. But these days it has fallen behind. The UN believes that in 2011 Colombia produced about 42% of the world’s coca, only slightly more than Peru. And last year a White House report concluded that when it comes to the production of cocaine itself, Colombia has now fallen behind both Peru and Bolivia. How were Colombia’s coke kings dethroned? Virtually all coca comes from three countries: Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The slopes of the Andes provide perfect conditions for the coca bush, whose leaves Andean people were chewing long before the arrival of European explorers. Chomped or boiled up as tea, the leaves provide a mild, caffeine-like buzz which dulls hunger and cold. Combined with a few everyday chemicals it makes the much stronger cocaine. Colombia was not always the biggest producer: in 1990 it was responsible for only 19% of the coca market, behind both Bolivia and Peru. But government crackdowns in Peru, and then Bolivia, drove the trade over the border into Colombia. In 1995 it overhauled Bolivia, and then overtook Peru in 1997 to become the world’s main supplier of coca leaves. The recent fall in coca cultivation in Colombia is partly down to a ramping up of enforcement by the Colombian government. With the help of funds from the United States under Plan Colombia, the government stepped up eradication efforts, spraying weed-killer from planes (Bolivia and Peru prefer manual eradication). At the same time demand fell in United States, Colombia’s main market: in 2010 2.2% of adults took the drug, down from 3% in 2006. Europeans, meanwhile, who get most of their cocaine from Bolivia and Peru, have become far more interested in cocaine: consumption in Britain, for instance, almost doubled between 2000 and 2010 (though it has since tailed off a bit). Bolivian and Peruvian growers therefore stepped up production. They have also had to meet greater local demand: Brazil has become the world’s biggest market for crack and the second-biggest for powder cocaine. Colombia’s fall from the number one cocaine-producing spot was described last year by Gil Kerlikowske, America’s drug tsar, as “historic”. The word is apt, though perhaps not in the way intended. History suggests that Peru’s dramatic reining in of coca production in the 1990s helped push the business into Colombia. Now that Colombia is cutting down, the industry seems to be moving back into Peru, where production of coca has increased by some 40% since 2000. The trafficking business, meanwhile, has been taken on by Mexican “cartels”, with appalling results in Mexico. Drug-policy geeks call this the “balloon effect”: pushing down on drug production in one region causes it to bulge somewhere else. Latin Americans have a better phrase: the efecto cucaracha, or cockroach effect. You can chase the pests out of one corner of your house, but they have an irritating habit of popping up somewhere else.

4/03/2013

Colombian police poking around a shipment of bricks bound for Honduras last month discovered half a tonne of cocaine hidden within the cargo. Such discoveries were once commonplace: in 2000 Colombia grew 74% of the world’s coca leaves, the raw ingredient for cocaine. But these days it has fallen behind. The UN believes that in 2011 Colombia produced about 42% of the world’s coca, only slightly more than Peru. And last year a White House report concluded that when it comes to the production of cocaine itself, Colombia has now fallen behind both Peru and Bolivia. [...]

Brazil Should Learn From the United States’ Drug War Mistakes

An armored police vehicle sits near two public buses set on fire by drug gangs trying to distract the police in Rio de Janeiro

3/18/2013

by Anthony Papa / Huffington post

The Brazilian Congress is debating a controversial bill, authored by Rep. Osmar Terra (PMDB-RS), which among other setbacks proposes increasing the minimum penalty required from 5 to 8 years for drug-related crimes. History has shown that this is the wrong way to go — and for evidence of this, it’s instructive to look to the U.S., where draconian “mandatory minimum” sentencing led to an explosion in the country’s prison population.

In the 1980s and ’90s the U.S. relied on tougher sentencing laws and mandatory sentencing — which did nothing to reduce [...]

Brazil tries to fight cocaine trafficking at huge, porous borders

Brazilian Federal Police on the Bolivian border

12/26/2012

Juan Forero / Washington post

GUAJARA-MIRIM, Brazil — The cocaine that anti-drug officials say is flooding into Brazil these days comes from neighboring Bolivia, in small planes that make 20-minute flights, in luggage ferried into river ports and in small dugout canoes that make clandestine trips in the middle of the night.

But in hamlets such as this one, Brazilian federal police officers try to stem the flow by urging villagers to report the suspicious activity on the 2,126-mile frontier with Bolivia, one longer than the U.S.-Mexico border. And in a speedboat, others patrol the Mamore River [...]

Evo Morales Scores One for the Coca Leaf

Bolivian president Evo Morales chats with Pepe Mujica president of Uruguay

1/13/2013

By MANUEL RUEDA / ABC

The United Nations Convention on Narcotic Drugs readmitted Bolivia into its fold on Friday, universally recognizing the right of Bolivians to chew the coca leaf. This gives President Evo Morales one of his most important victories thus far in his global efforts to decriminalize the coca leaf.

Bolivia had voluntary withdrawn from the UN group a year ago because it classified the coca leaf as an “illicit drug.” On Friday, however, a majority of the convention’s members voted to allow Bolivia back into the committee and also approved a statute which [...]

Coca Licensing Is a Weapon in Bolivia’s Drug War

separating the seeds from dried coca leaves

12/27/2012

By WILLIAM NEUMAN / New York Times

TODOS SANTOS, Bolivia — There is nothing clandestine about Julián Rojas’s coca plot, which is tucked deep within acres of banana groves. It has been mapped with satellite imagery, cataloged in a government database, cross-referenced with his personal information and checked and rechecked by the local coca growers’ union. The same goes for the plots worked by Mr. Rojas’s neighbors and thousands of other farmers in this torrid region east of the Andes who are licensed by the Bolivian government to grow coca, the plant used to make cocaine.

[...]

Radio journalist set alight while on air in Bolivia

11/03/2012

A Bolivian radio presenter was set on fire by four masked men while hosting his show in the southern city of Yacuiba.

Radio Popular journalist Fernando Vidal, 78, is being treated for burns after his attackers broke into the studio, poured petrol over him and set him alight.

Studio technician Karen Anza was also injured in the attack which some eyewitnesses claim involved Molotov cocktails.

His son-in-law, Esteban Farfan says Mr Vidal has suffered burns to his face, arms and chest.

Three people have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attack.

Mr. Vidal was reporting [...]

Bolivia, Myanmar, Venezuela failing drug war: US

09/16/2012

For the fourth year running, Washington accused all three countries of having “failed demonstrably” to fight the drug trade.

But President Barack Obama’s administration noted that Myanmar, which has been blacklisted since 2002 and is the world’s second largest cultivator of opium poppy, has made significant strides this year in joining the international fight against illegal drugs.

Myanmar officials have already destroyed more than three times the amount of opium poppy lands as they did last year, according to the president’s annual memorandum to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that helps set US drug policy.

The country [...]

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